


Vulture Lullabies

by Florence_in_Silver



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Creatures, Cryptids, F/F, Fantasy, Fluff, Gen, Mythology - Freeform, Romance, Slow Burn, Swan-Mills Family, Vampires, Werewolves, eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2019-08-16 21:32:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 58,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16503092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Florence_in_Silver/pseuds/Florence_in_Silver
Summary: When a vampire named Regina finds an abused boy hiding in a dog house, she decides to take matters into her own hands. She kills his foster parents and takes the boy as her own. Things aren't easy on the run, however, especially when it turns out that Henry's birth mother is part of a covert government agency that is hunting for them. Slow-burn Swan Queen.





	1. Angel Down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: references to child abuse and some gore

_ You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder. _

James 2:19

***

Pastor John loved to talk about demons, and the devil, and hellfire. His sermons always threw in a few references to the eternal fires and servants of hell, but on certain days, such as this one, they contained nothing else. He was well into the speech by now, having set aside what he had written and let the spirit take him the rest of the way through the sermon. His hand gestures became more animated and his words more fervent with each sentence as he spoke of the sinners that surrounded his flock, of how they were threatened on all sides. The devil was breathing down their necks and if they didn’t fight and spread the good word, he would catch them all.

In the eighth pew of the small church, on the left side, sat a ten year old boy who was neither looking at the pastor, nor listening all that well to him either. His name was Henry and he preferred not to think of demons at all. They frightened him. He’d seen pictures of them with goat legs and horns, terrible fangs, and sharp tails that looked like spears. So he tuned out whatever Pastor John was saying, only catching a stray word here and there, and he thought about angels instead. There was a little painting of an angel on the left side of the church that he liked to watch during the long sermons. His foster parents didn’t mind him not paying attention, so long as he was quiet and still. So he spent the hours memorizing every detail of that painting. He knew the angel’s pretty face better than his own, he knew how many feathers were on each wing, and he knew the exact pattern of her curly blonde hair. She was tall and strong, but looked very peaceful as she gazed upward. Though he never said it aloud, he often dreamed of her, swooping down on her massive wings, scooping him up, and flying away with him. She hadn’t come yet outside of the dream, but he just told himself that she was running late. She would be there soon, to take him away from all of this.

Eventually, the sermon did end, which Henry didn’t realize until his foster mother stood and snapped at him that they were leaving. He waved goodbye to the angel on the wall before following her out of the church. Outside, winter was truly setting in around them and a light layer of snow was covering the frozen ground. In the distance, high jagged mountains capped in permanent white snow rose upward, but where they stood was flat farmland. 

That night was a bad one for Henry’s foster father, Tom Laroy. The bad nights had been rare when the Laroys first took in Henry, but they were growing more frequent. They always started with Tom having a drink and Sharon calling him a useless waste of space and then a whole series of words that Henry had gotten into trouble for repeating at school. Son of a bitch was her favorite. Then the conversation would turn to Henry. Tom would say they should send him back and save themselves the trouble of him, and Sharon would say that they needed the money, especially with Tom not working. And finally Tom would scream for Henry to come to him and Henry would have to wear long sleeves to school the next day to hide the bruises. This night, they were still yelling about Tom’s unemployment, not yet on the topic of Henry, so he still had time. He lay in his small bedroom upstairs until he could no longer listen. He got up, crept down the staircase, and out of the back door, avoiding the living room where Tom and Sharon were fighting. He was an expert at being quiet and they were far too involved in their fight to hear him, and so he made it safely outside. Once he stepped out into the yard, however, he realized that in his hurry to leave, he had forgotten his coat. He wore only a thin sweater, an old pair of pants, and tennis shoes. It was cold enough on its own, but with the wind rushing down from the mountains and cutting through him as he wore nothing at all, it was unbearable. Wrapping his arms around himself, he walked carefully through the yard, navigating the trash and scrap metal that were littered through it, around the empty barn, until he reached the small doghouse.

The droopy face of a coonhound peered out of the doghouse and in the shadows Henry could see his tail wagging. Hank was the best, and probably the only good, thing about living with the Laroys. He was a sweet natured dog, despite being chained to a peg in the yard all the time, and he loved Henry more than anyone. Henry got down on all fours and crawled into the doghouse, curling up beside Hank and petting his long soft ears. Hank licked his hands and wagged his tail some more. Even with the dog next to him, it was cold, but sleeping out in the doghouse was far more tolerable than going back now, so Henry shut his eyes. Sharon always made him pray before bed and he usually did so silently, with his hands crossed in front of him. But tonight he said them aloud.

“Dear God. Please send me an angel. The nicest angel you have.”

***

There are certain songs that are just wildly inappropriate for a situation. Edith Piaf’s  _ La Vie en Rose _ , for example, was a beautiful melody, perfect for drinking coffee in a cafe while it rained outside or having a romantic rooftop date with your fiance. It did not seem a good choice, however, for someone who was licking the blood of the man she had just killed off of her fingertips. If you had to choose an Edith Piaf song for that particular occasion, then  _ Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien _ might work, but then again who was to say what song was the best to eat someone to.

As it were, the woman with the bloody hands was not particularly inclined to get up to change the music. The iphone, from which it was playing, was over by the dead body and she was not quite ready to face it at the moment. She could at least finish her meal first. 

The body had once belonged to a middle aged and nicely dressed man, and now it lay in a horrible state on the tile floor beneath the sink of the motel. He had worn a business suit, which was now bloodstained and torn open in the chest, as was the man himself. There was a messy hole where his heart had once been, now only filled with blood and shards of broken ribs. His wrists were ripped open as well, but they were less of a mess, as most of the blood had been sucked out of them. Less spillage that way.

Still sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, the woman pulled a cigarette out of the carton with fingers that were still stained pink. She placed it in her mouth, lit it, and took a few slow puffs. She hated this part. She muttered a few words under her breath and then flicked the lit cigarette over so that it landed on the chest of the man. It flamed up, quickly setting the whole body on fire. Once fires burned through the skin and reached the fatty tissue inside, humans went up like candles. The smell of burning flesh was horrendous, so the woman grabbed her purse and left the motel, walking away into the night.

***

Henry awoke still and cold. His neck hurt from the angle that he had slept in. Nervously, he wiggled all his fingers and toes, and as much as they hurt to move, he figured it was good that at least he could still feel them. It was still dark outside, with the only light coming from the nearly full moon, and Hank was still snoring beside him. Henry stretched as best he could and moved closer to Hank for warmth, when Hank sat upright with a jerk. The dog sniffed the air intently and let out one loud bark. Henry squinted through the gloom to see what coyote or raccoon had caught his attention. With a fluttering sound, a vulture landed on the ground in front of them. It was a large bird with black feathers and a wrinkled black head, and should have been hard to make out in the darkness, but Henry found he could easily see the details of the bird from the sharp, hooked beak and to the dark, shiny eyes. He was also surprised that Hank did not bark more and scare the vulture away. The dog had gone oddly quiet. The vulture walked closer to them and Henry felt his own voice shrink down inside him from the fear. It did nothing however, except raise its large wings and use them to cover the entrance of the dog house, blocking the cold wind from entering. Henry watched it for several minutes, until at last he began to feel warm and could no longer fight off sleep.

The morning sun and a cold blast of air woke Henry. The vulture was gone, but Hank still lay by his side. He gave the dog a scratch behind the ears and crawled out of the doghouse. He wasn’t sure what time it was, but he knew he didn’t want to go back home just yet. The school bus came by at 7:00 am, so he decided to walk down the long driveway and wait for it there. He sat down with his back against a tree, still in his Sunday clothes and without his backpack. Across the street, on the branch of a pine tree sat the vulture. At least, Henry thought it was the same vulture. It was hard to tell one from the other. This one had a black head like the one from earlier.

Henry continued to see the vulture throughout the day until he was sure that it had to be the same one. He thought he must be dying, because it followed him around, watching him as if waiting for him to drop dead. It was outside of his classroom all day, on the same pine tree when he got off the bus, and it even sat right outside the window of the house as Tom and Sharon screamed at him for running off. When Tom lost his temper and knocked Henry to the ground, he could see it on the windowsill of the living room, watching them with a strange look in its black eyes. Later, he watched the vulture flying above the house, moving across the sky and then turning to cross its own path in an X shape.

Henry slept in his own bed that night, as Tom had used up all of his rage already and passed out on the couch. There was no need to sleep in the doghouse again, although he did miss the company of Hank. He was just drifting off when a crashing sound from downstairs yanked him out of slumber. It wasn’t a particularly unusual sound, as Tom tended to be clumsy when he drank, but the raspy hissing that followed was like nothing Henry had heard before. Curiosity overcame common sense and he went downstairs.

It took him a moment to make sense of the scene in front of him. The lamp had been knocked over, causing the crashing sound, but that was far from the most disturbing thing happening in the living room. Sharon lay on the floor, with her eyes gazing blankly and without blinking up at the ceiling. Her throat was slashed open and there was a bloody hole in her chest. Still on the sofa, Tom had a similar neck wound, but his chest was still intact. He also appeared to still be slightly alive as his finger twitched a little and a faint gurgling sound came from his throat. In the center of the room stood a woman with her back to Henry, the source of the hissing sound. Long black hair hung down her back, but he could see nothing of her face. Her hands were bloody, with one clenched at her side and the other holding something red and dripping. The hissing sound stopped and she slowly turned around to face him. Her skin was light brown, her features sharp and angry-looking, and her teeth bright white when she spoke to him.

“Go wait upstairs,” was all she said.

Henry looked once more before he turned and ran back to his bedroom. He sat on top of the quilted bed, not quite sure what to do now.

After a few minutes he heard footsteps, soon followed by the woman entering the bedroom. The blood was gone from her hands and her expression looked softer.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” she said. She sat next to him on the bed.

“You aren’t what I was expecting,” said Henry. That seemed to surprise her.

“You were expecting me?” she asked. Her voice was a little raspy, but there was something about it that Henry liked.

“You’re my guardian angel,” he said. She definitely looked nothing like the big blonde angel in the painting, but he still recognized her right away. 

“I’m not an angel,” she said. “Maybe the opposite.”

Henry shrugged.

“Do you have any other family?” she asked.

Henry shook his head and said, “I’m an orphan. They’re my foster parents.”

“Well, I suppose you’re coming with me then. Pack a bag with anything you want to bring with you and meet me downstairs. And no more of this angel talk, alright?”

“Alright,” said Henry.

She reached out and patted him somewhat awkwardly on the knee before leaving the room. Henry grabbed his school backpack and dumped the contents out onto the bed. He grabbed a book of fairy tales that had been a hand me down from one the Laroys’ previous foster kids, a stuffed velociraptor toy, a sketchbook and his colored pencils. The Laroys hadn’t given him many things to begin with and he had nothing from his birth family, whoever they were, so that was all he wanted to take. He went downstairs to find that Tom and Sharon’s bodies had both been covered with sheets, though the blood did soak through them. He looked away from them and instead turned to look at the woman. The room smelled strange though, like a gas station, and that he couldn’t turn away from.

“Ready to go?” the woman asked, offering her hand. Henry nodded and slowly took it. She led him outside to Tom’s Ford F150 truck, formerly his pride and joy. Hank was stretched across the backseat, panting a little, but he wagged his tail when he saw Henry

“What do you say we burn this whole place down?” the woman asked.

Again Henry nodded. He hadn’t quite found his voice with the woman.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a metal lighter, clicking it so that a small flame lit up their faces with a soft orange glow. She said something in a language that Henry didn’t understand and threw the lighter at the house. It went up in flames much faster than Henry expected. It seemed like less than a second and the place was an inferno. The warmth felt good rolling off of the flames, though it all smelled terrible. The woman reached down and picked Henry up. He was probably too old for such things, but he didn’t mind and she was certainly strong enough to hold him. They watched the fire for a few minutes before getting in the truck and driving away. Henry could hear sirens in the distance, but the woman didn’t seem worried at all.

“What’s your name?” he finally asked her, once they had gotten onto the dark and empty highway.

“You can call me Regina. And yours?”

“I’m Henry.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you Henry.”

He watched her for a moment, trying to work up the courage to ask her the real question on his mind.

“Are you a fallen angel?” What he really wanted to say was ‘What the heck are you?’ but that seemed too rude.

“I’m not any sort of angel. Why do you think that?”

“The night you came. I was praying for a guardian angel to fly down and take me away. And then you did.”

“Well, whatever god you were praying to must have quite the sense of humor.”

They fell into silence again and Henry stared forward at the headlights illuminating the road. He felt warm and safe in the truck, an unusual feeling and made even more so by the fact that he was sitting next to a murderer. The hum of the truck was soothing, as well, and he soon felt his eyelids grow heavy. He let himself slump against the door of the truck and was soon asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to throw in a little Lilo and Stitch reference.  
> Also the story of Henry sleeping in the doghouse is based on a true story of Buck Brannaman. He's a famous horse trainer who had a really rough childhood.  
> Comments are appreciated!


	2. Bad Moon Rising

_ When Little Red Cap entered the woods a wolf came up to her. She did not know what a wicked animal he was, and was not afraid of him. _

The Brothers Grimm, “Little Red Cap” 

***

Henry woke briefly in the middle of the night to find the truck had been parked in front of an airport. He saw that Hank was sound asleep in the backseat and he could hear Regina outside doing something. He watched her come around from the back of the truck in the rearview mirror. 

“Where are we?” he asked when she had gotten back into the truck.

“We are in the long term parking lot of Cheyenne Regional Airport,” she said. “It isn’t a good idea to get caught wearing the plates of a stolen truck that belonged to a murder victim. So I switched them out with one of the trucks here. Hopefully they won’t even realize when they get back, but just in case, we should probably get a new car in a few days. It’s a trick that an old friend of mine once showed me. She knew how to get away with all sorts of things like this.”

Whether or not Regina had continued talking about her friend, Henry wasn’t sure, as he had drifted off to sleep again.

***

The next morning they stopped for breakfast at Granny’s Diner, a restaurant located in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. Other than a small gas station, it was the only building on the highway in sight. Around them stretched nothing but sparse shrublands and the occasional cow pasture. It was warmer here, but not by much, and still cold enough to leave Hank in the truck without worrying about him overheating. At least there was no snow on the ground. Inside, the diner was fashioned to mimic the classic fifties look, though it was not so much classic as tacky. The whole place was a display of bright pink and turquoise plastic, Elvis posters, and dingy tile. The food smelled good, though, and Henry could feel his stomach begin to growl. It wasn’t what you could call crowded, as there was only one other customer in the place, a middle aged man with his face hidden behind a newspaper. Regina and Henry slid into one of the booths and waited for the waitress to take their order. 

“Are you a serial killer, like Hannibal Lecter?” Henry blurted out.

“What, no! And keep your voice down!” She scrunched up her face as if revolted or insulted, but then she sighed and gave a shrug. “Actually that might not be too far off. I’m not a cannibal, though. Not exactly.”

Henry didn’t know what that meant, so he stayed quiet and hoped that she’d say more.

“I mean a human that eats humans is a cannibal, but I’m not…” she trailed off. “And I only eat the hearts and drink the blood, none of that nasty organ stuff.”

“You’re a vampire?”

“Sort of. Not like Dracula. A different kind.”

“Do you have super powers?”

She looked around the diner, making sure no one was close enough to hear. 

“I can turn into a vulture. I’m strong, like really strong. And I can do some magic with fire and reanimating corpses, that sort of thing.” 

She stopped talking as the waitress came up to take their breakfast orders. Once the woman had left, Henry leaned in and whispered, “So you eat real food, too?”

Regina wasn’t sure why this was the question he decided to be the quietest for, but she mimicked him anyway, leaning forward conspiratorially.

“Yes, I love a good omelette,” she said.

“But you need blood.”

“Only like once a month or so.”

“So you kill people?” His eyes were so wide as he asked it. It would have been comical if it wasn’t a conversation about murder with a ten year old.

“I, um, haven’t found any other way to get what I need,” she said, looking ashamed. “But I do try to only kill ones like your foster parents, you know. Real pieces of shit...But don’t say ‘shit,’ kid.” She quickly corrected herself on the bad language.

They paused the conversation again as the food arrived. It smelled even better when it was sitting right in front of them. Henry dove into his pancakes with a fervor, but Regina took a moment to watch him, fiddling with her fork.

“Jesus, kid, were they even feeding you?” she asked.

Henry looked up for a moment, wondering if he should be embarrassed, and then shrugged. The Laroys had fed him, but sometimes they forgot and sometimes, when they were mad, they sent him to bed without dinner. Besides nothing could taste as good as this. The old lady behind the counter could cook like no other.

“So how’d you end up with them?” Regina asked.

“My birth parents didn’t want me, I guess. Or they died. I don’t really know. I just know I never knew them. I went to other foster families before the Laroys. Some of them were better, I guess. I liked the Malonsons. They were old, but nice.”

“How old were you when the Laroys adopted you?”

“Eight. I was with them for two years.”

Henry stared at her for a moment, shifting a little uncomfortably. 

“You’re not going to take me back, right?” he asked.

“No, I’m not. I’m your guardian vampire, remember?” She smiled at him. Her teeth were still a little unsettling, but it nice nonetheless. “Why don’t you go pick a song to play on the jukebox?”

She handed him a handful of quarters and he ran up to the old machine. He took a moment to glance over the names of the available songs, but he didn’t recognize any of them. He selected one called “Mack the Knife,” because he thought Regina would like something like that.

While he was up, Regina caught a snippet of a conversation that the man with the newspaper was having with the waitress. Something about an attack in town. Her back was to them, but she could hear them well enough.

“That’s awful,” the waitress said. “What do they think did it? Coyotes?”

“Something bigger than that. Mountain lion or bear is my guess. You know, these tourists come here thinking they can hike the trails with no idea of what they’re doing, and then something like this happens. I tell you, I had a cousin who got bit by a bobcat, and even that little sucker got two of his fingers. It’d have to be something big, though, I’ll tell you that. I mean, there was nothing left of the guy, except a few parts and a lot of blood,” said the man.

Regina looked over at the counter and saw that she was not the only one listening in. The cook, a plump older woman with curly gray hair piled on top of her head, was watching them intently. She was wiping down the countertop, but her attention was obviously on the waitress and the man, and she hadn’t looked down at the spot she was washing in over a minute. She noticed that Regina had caught her staring, however, and looked away with a frown on her face.

_ Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear, and it shows them pearly white. _

An old jazzy song began to play on the jukebox as Henry returned to the booth.

“Good choice,” said Regina, not really listening to the song, but it made Henry smile to hear her say it. Her attention was still on the animal attack, though the man and the waitress had moved on to a different topic of conversation. It could have been a bear or a mountain lion attack, but in her experience, that was rarely the case. 

“Let’s get out of here. I’ll get you a box for the rest of your pancakes,” said Regina.

***

The fire department had managed to stop the blaze at the Laroy’s house sometime during the night, but the fire had been devastating. Now all that remained was a pile of rubble and some lingering smoke. The yard, the barn, even the little doghouse, had remained untouched by the fire, but the house itself had been burned down to ash. A few of the support beams were still somewhat intact, but they were blackened and weak and would fall down soon enough.

“What a goddamn mess,” said Emma Swan, looking at the charred bones of the old farmhouse. 

“Let’s pull the bodies out and see what we can find,” said her partner, Graham Humbert.

This was not exactly how Emma had wanted to spend her day off, first investigating an apparent case of spontaneous human combustion and then a house fire about a hundred miles away. Spontaneous human combustions were almost always cryptid related and this case seemed no different. It was cleaner than most, but it still reeked of inhuman involvement, which meant that she and Graham were on the case. They were agents of the Bureau of Cryptid Concealment, more commonly known as the B.C.C., an organization that specialized in keeping the supernatural population hidden from the general public.

They managed to uncover the bodies from the rubble, though there was nothing left except for the bones, which themselves were covered in stress fractures from the heat. Having the second floor of the building collapse and fall upon the bodies did nothing the help their condition. It was going to be difficult to identify them, even trying to use dental records. 

“The owners on the deed were Tom, age 41, and Sharon, 38, Laroy. They had a ten year old foster son named Henry. I think we can safely say that these are the bodies of the parents. No child sized skeletons, luckily.”

“Ten years old,” said Emma, lost in thought. She snapped herself out of it and then added, “No sign of the boy. Do you think we can track him?”

“Maybe. We also need to think about what we’re dealing with here. Is this an arsonist that burns for pleasure and accidentally kills along the way? If that’s the case, it could be a particularly violent phoenix or an anzu, maybe even a jinn.”

“But the hotel burning was only of the body. If they were after a big fire for fun, wouldn’t they want to set the whole place alight?”

“Nice work,” said Graham. Though he looked about the same age as Emma, he was a good twenty years older and had worked for the B.C.C. for much longer. She was technically no longer a trainee, but she still had a lot to learn about the job.

“So they either used the fire to kill the victims or to cover up the crime,” said Emma.

“And my money’s on the later. Many cryptids have some pretty distinctive ways of killing or eating people, and fire hides a lot of marks. I’m going to change and sniff around, see if I can pick anything up.”

Graham pulled off his shirt and trousers, and handed them to Emma. He then hunched over, his face twisted in a grimace of pain. His muscles began to shift and move around, looking like there were eels writhing beneath his skin. His fingers stretched and the nails lengthened into claws, his teeth got sharper, his eyes turned yellow, and with a sound like a backbone popping, he fell onto all fours in the form of a wolf. Well, close enough to a wolf. He was a little bigger and higher in the shoulder, and his head was a little more square, but from a distance he would look to anyone like a wolf.

He paced around the house and yard, sniffing the wreckage and the items there. He even went around the barn and investigated the empty dog house. After thoroughly getting the scent of the place he shifted back into a man.

“I think I got a clear scent of the boy, in the doghouse of all places. There’s something else here, as well. It isn’t human, that’s for sure, but I don’t recognize it at all,” he said.

“Do you think it’s our guy?” Emma asked.

“I think so. That scent and the little boy’s both head in the same direction. The killer must have taken him. You take the car and follow along beside me.” With that he was back in the form of the wolf and running down the driveway.

Emma threw his clothes into the backseat of their car and started driving after him. He was quick in his wolf form, but his light gray fur was easy to see. Emma thought about the child, Henry, as she drove. There must be hundreds of thousands of foster kids in the US and thousands of those who were ten year old boys. Still she couldn’t help but to think of her own little boy, who would be ten years old now - but no, she shook her head, trying to get such thoughts out of her head. She needed to focus on this case.

***

The truck made a screech and then a pitiful sputtering sound and the engine died again. Regina tried for the fifth time to start it, but this time it made no sound at all.

“Damn thing,” she muttered. She got out of the truck and opened up the hood to look underneath. There was no smoke at least, and she figured that was a pretty good sign. They were still in the parking lot of Granny’s, trying to get the truck to start. So much for leaving town quickly. 

“What’s wrong with it?” Henry asked.

“I don’t know. Do I look like a mechanic?” Regina snapped, more harshly than she had intended. It looked very much like an engine to her, but other than that she couldn’t discern much about it. Nothing was obviously broken or missing. She slammed the hood back down.

“Stay here. I’ll go call a tow truck inside,” she said.

“Back already?” asked the cook, when Regina walked back into the diner.

“I can’t get my car to start. Do you have the number for a good tow truck?”

“Sure do. You’re definitely not the first person to break down around here.” The woman handed her a business card. “Billy’ll take care of you.”

Regina went outside to use the old pay phone. She didn’t trust cell phones enough to carry one of her own, not even a burner. She got a hold of Billy, who said it would take him twenty minutes to get out to them. She then went back into the truck.

“Tow truck will be here soon,” she said, rubbing her hands together to warm them. “Hopefully we can get this fixed quickly and be back on the road.”

“Where are we going?”

“New Orleans. I’ve got a friend there that may be able to help us out with some stuff.”

“What about the animal attack?”

“You heard them talking about that?” Regina asked. 

“Yeah, they weren’t quiet about it.”

“So, what do you mean ‘what about it?’”

“I mean, you’re like a superhero. We should probably stop it.” He leaned toward her, looking hopeful and eager.

“First of all, there is no we. And second, there is not even a me. We can’t spend our time hunting down some rabid cougar.”

“They said the body was found on the Red Rock Trail. We could start there,” he said.

“Absolutely not. It’s too dangerous.”

“Please.”

“No.”

***

Regina couldn’t believe she was doing this. The truck was at the mechanic’s until the next morning, and she was following Henry and Hank down the Red Rock Trail. She had to admit it was a gorgeous place, with the trail running along a shallow bluff line of sandstone. Rolling hills of grass and stone rose up around them, but the trail itself was relatively flat. Hank was having a good time, stopping to sniff every few seconds. He was wagging his tail as if he had never been for a walk before, but then again, he probably hadn’t. Regina was hoping they would simply have a nice and hopefully brief stroll and be back at their motel before sunset.

It was still early evening, but the sky was starting to turn a pale orange as the sun drooped. The moon was out already. It was always a strange sight to see it while it was still daylight. It looked full, as well, but not as bright as it would be in a few hours.

Henry seemed pretty relaxed, too, given that they were on a stake out for either a rabid animal or a terrifying monster. He was a weird kid, to be honest. And she didn’t mean that in any way as an insult. She herself was far too strange to point fingers at anyone else, but she didn’t think many ten year olds would be this calm on a murder mission. Or suicide mission. Depending on how things went.

Still, things had been quiet so far. They had seen some pronghorns, a hare, and a jogger or two, but that was it.

“Maybe we need a better view,” said Henry, putting his hands on his hips as he observed one of the bluffs.

“That’s pretty steep, kid.”

“You can fly.”

“But you can’t. And I’m not leaving you down here alone.”

Henry said nothing but opened his eyes a little wider, almost pleading. He could give Hank a run for his money with that puppy dog face.

“Fine,” she said. She picked up Hank and placed him over her shoulders like a giant fox fur shawl. He had to be the most passive dog in the world, and simply licked her face before settling down.

“You go first and I’ll be behind you to catch you,” she said.

It was sloped and rocky enough that they were able to climb and crawl their way up. It certainly wasn’t the most intense rock climbing she had ever done, but with a dog to carry and a child to keep an eye on, it also wasn’t the easiest. The rocks were made of a grainy sandstone, which wasn’t sharp enough to cut, but did leave Henry’s palms a little scratched up. He didn’t complain, though, and even seemed quite proud of the marks once they had reached the top. They couldn’t be more than 20 feet off the ground, but it did give them a better vantage point of the trail and the surrounding area. Regina had to admit that the view was stunning, as well, showing a vast orange sky and dramatic shadows on the rock formations from the setting sun.

“Isn’t that the waitress from the diner?” Henry asked, pointing.

It was. Regina hadn’t paid her too much attention during breakfast, writing her off as the typical small town girl with big town dreams, dying to get out of small town, New Mexico. She was young and pretty, with red streaks in her hair, a big smile, and big teeth. She had changed out of her waitress uniform and was jogging down the path in tights and a red hoodie. Behind her, a second jogger was catching up to her, this one a man, also wearing a hoodie, but with the hood up so they couldn’t see his face. Henry leaned over the edge of the bluff to get a better look at them and Regina had to grab him by his collar and pull him back.

“Hey, hey wait up,” the man said. He sounded a little out of breath. The waitress didn’t seem to notice him, so he called out to her again. This time she pulled earbuds out of her ears and stopped to hear him.

“Yeah?” she said.

Henry had grabbed Regina’s arm so hard that his knuckles turned white.

“You have to help her. I think that’s him,” he hissed through clenched teeth. The man seemed like just a typical sleeze to Regina, but she had learned the hard way not to underestimate people. You never knew what was lurking beneath the surface. 

Regina backed up a little on the rock and then jumped, turning smoothly into a black vulture in the air. She flew in a circle, slowly getting lower and closer to the two.

“I was just thinking you could use some company, you know. It could be dangerous for such a beautiful girl to be out here all alone,” the man was saying.

“No, thank you,” said the waitress. She put her headphones back in and started to turn away from the man. 

“Hey, I wasn’t done talking to you!” he snapped, grabbing her elbow and yanking her back to face him. Regina tilted forward to swoop down on the man, but before she could, the waitress had backhanded him and knocked him to the ground. Regina pulled up quickly, and flew back around to see them. The man was still lying on the ground, clutching his face. Regina could see and smell blood leaking from beneath his hands. When he pulled his hands away for a moment, she saw that he had three deep gashes across his cheek and mouth. He began to scream in pain while the waitress stood still and calm over him. Regina landed on one of the low rock outcroppings of the bluff so she could see the scene better. 

The waitress was definitely a cryptid. Her eyes were glowing yellow and her fingers had turned into monstrous looking claws. She was completely focused on the man, tensed and waiting like a cat with a baby bird. Then she moved toward him, falling forward onto her front arms, which weren’t arms anymore at all, but the front legs of a huge wolf. The man’s screams turned from ones of pain to fear when he saw the wolf. Regina could barely hear Henry shouting at her stop the wolf over the sound of the man. She sighed - well, as best as a vulture could sigh - and flew over the wolf. She scratched her talons against the its shoulder, breaking its focus from the man. She turned back into human form and dropped onto the ground. In her vampire form, she could see the intricate pattern of the man’s veins and arteries underneath his skin, and the blood dripping out of his wounds seemed to glow with a white hot light. All the other details of the area dulled, as if she were wearing dark sunglasses, but the circulatory system of each living thing showed up in vivid color and light to her. There was a horrible hissing sound in her ears that she knew was coming from herself. She hoped Henry couldn’t see her face from where he sat. She knew it was horrible when she got like this. Her teeth grew long and fanged and her features became sunken and gaunt. She wanted to spare him from the sight of her vampire face for now.

The wolf shook itself off and faced Regina, snarling and showing its teeth. It lunged for her, but she managed to jump aside. The wolf was thrown off balance, so Regina took the opportunity and slammed into it, throwing it backward and causing it to land heavily on its side. She ran over and grabbed the still screaming man, pulling him to his feet.

“Get out of here,” she hissed, and he took off running in the direction he had come from, as fast as he could.

The wolf stood, holding one of its legs gingerly, as if it was injured. Regina ran forward and knocked it down again, and punched it squarely in the head. She turned back into a vulture and flew up to Henry, who was leaning out over the bluff to get a better view of the fight. Once she was back in human form, she grabbed him around the waist and pulled him away from the edge. He looked at her in amazement and reached up to touch her face, but she gently slapped his hand away. She could still see all his veins and his heart pumping, so she took a few deep breaths until her vision returned to normal. The hissing sound stopped. So much for hiding her face, but he didn’t seem too scarred for life.

“I think we’d better go,” Regina said. She took his hand and Hank’s leash and together they began to run along the top of the bluff line. Below them, the wolf was back on its feet and running on the trail, chasing them from 20 feet below. It seemed to be looking for a place that had a gentle enough slope for it to scale the bluff and reach them. Regina turned away from the edge of the bluff and led them into the pine forest. Behind them, they could hear the wolf howling in anger at their escape.

It took them hours to walk back to the motel, especially given the circular route they took to avoid the wolf. The sun had long since set, leaving only the bright round moon to illuminate the forest and then the empty roads. They arrived with Henry and Hank a little scratched up and Regina pulling pine needles out of her hair. The motel was small, cheap, and dingy, but after their day, it was as good as the Hilton.

“Let’s get the hell out of here as soon as we can,” Regina said, already starting to drift off. After a moment’s pause, she corrected herself and said, “Don’t say hell.”

The next morning, the truck was mended, with a new break line or carburetor, or some shit - Regina didn’t pay that close of attention to what Billy the mechanic had said - and she and Henry were quick to drive out of town. They passed Granny’s Diner on the way out, which looked like it was closed and deserted. Regina stepped on the gas pedal, so they zoomed past it and continued on their way south.

***

Emma Swan was utterly dreading the endless paperwork that she was going to have to do, trying to explain this clusterfuck. It was a cruel paradox that the most interesting and complicated cases always led to the most boring and time consuming paperwork. She and Graham had followed the missing boy’s scent all the way down to New Mexico. Instead of finding him and the creature that had stolen him, however, they found themselves caught up in the case of a feral werewolf. One hiker was dead, ripped to pieces, and another one injured and traumatized. 

The werewolf had been easy to find at least. She was reckless, wild, and completely out of control. They cornered her on the edge of a natural park, finding her snarling and angry. She had lunged at Graham, but Emma shot her with a tranquilizer dart before she was within ten feet of him. She growled and staggered for a minute before falling down asleep. The wolf form quickly shifted back into that of a young woman with long brown and red hair. Emma had put silver handcuffs on her and loaded her into the car. But Graham had yet another werewolf to track down.

This one they found in a small white house on the southeastern outskirts of the town. 

“Ms. Lucas?” Emma asked when the old woman answered the door. She had gotten the name from the painted mailbox in front of the house.

“Yes?” the woman said, looking suspiciously at Emma. Graham was back in human form, but as soon as Ms. Lucas saw him, her eyes widened in recognition.

“Where is she?” Ms. Lucas said, not needing to specify who she was talking about.

“Who is she to you?” asked Graham.

“My granddaughter. If you hurt her -” she began.

“Your granddaughter is fine. Unharmed, at least. May we come inside?” he asked.

The old woman opened the door a little wider and stood somewhat grudgingly to the side. Graham and Emma went into the living room and sat on a floral patterned sofa. Ms. Lucas took a seat across from them in a little armchair.

“Ma’am, my name is Agent Humbert and this is Agent Swan. We work for the B.C.C.”

“And what does the Bureau want with my granddaughter?” Ms. Lucas asked through clenched teeth.

“Do you know where she was two nights ago at 7 pm?” asked Graham. 

Ms. Lucas didn’t answer, but shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

“Because we think she was disemboweling a hiker at that time,” said Emma. That got a glare from Ms. Lucas, but she still said nothing.

“She has to be what - twenty three, twenty four? And she is acting as careless as if she were just bitten. But she was born a werewolf, wasn’t she? So why doesn’t she have better control?” Graham asked, his voice raising a little. He didn’t like the violent reputation that his species had and he didn’t like the werewolves that perpetuated it.

“I-” Ms. Lucas’ voice cracked a little and she took a deep breath before trying again, “I just didn’t want her to be a part of this life. I thought I could save her from it, so I went to a witch doctor and she gave me some enchanted tea. It kept Ruby from changing, even around the full moon, and dulled her wolf senses, but lately I think the magic has been wearing off.”

Graham leaned back in the sofa and rubbed his eyes.

“Did she know that the tea would keep her from changing?” Emma asked.

“No, she didn’t even…” Ms. Lucas trailed off.

“She didn’t even know she was a werewolf,” Graham finished for her.

“I thought I could protect her and everyone else from this curse.” As she said it, Ms. Lucas rubbed a spot on her left forearm through her sleeve. “What’s going to happen to her?”

“We’re going to take her to a rehabilitation facility. If she works hard and gains control of herself, then she will be released back into the public. Now, I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with us, as well,” said Graham. He stood and pulled out a second pair of silver handcuffs. The old woman nodded, looking resigned, and came with them without a fight. They put her in the backseat with her unconscious granddaughter.

“We’ll drop them off in Tombstone and then get back to our murderer kidnapper,” Graham said.

Emma didn’t like the thought of leaving that little boy with whatever had burned down the house in Wyoming, but she also knew they couldn’t pursue them with two werewolves in the back seat. The kid would just have to hang on for a few more days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Emma's here at last!  
> Please comment below!


	3. Save My Soul

_I wondered why so many gardens around the world focused on the healing power of plants rather than their ability to kill… I felt that most children I knew would be more interested in hearing how a plant killed, how long it would take you to die if you ate it, and how gruesome and painful the death might be._

The Duchess of Northumberland

***

Henry had his nose buried in a comic book as Regina drove them ever onward down the highway.  Regina said that they were in for a long drive that day. She seemed anxious to get to their destination, or at least to get away from the werewolf town. They had stopped in Texas to pick up some supplies for their trip, and she had bought some books and snacks for Henry and a kong toy for Hank to get them through the trip without having to stop too often. Henry was content with that plan. He was enjoying the comic she had gotten him. It was much more violent than anything he had ever read before. It was all about a war between people with horns and people with wings, but it took place in space and had all kinds of ghosts, aliens, and monsters, too.

Regina was listening to some slow jazz song on the radio about a muddy river. Henry would pause his reading every once in awhile to look over at her.

“What’s on your mind, kid?”

“That was nice of you to save the hiker man, even if he was kind of a jerk,” Henry said.

“I suppose.”

“I think I know why I found you.”

“Oh, you found me, did you?” She chuckled a little as she said it.

“Yes. And I think I know why. I can help you help people.”

“What? Why?” she asked.

“So you’re not an angel. And you kill people. But maybe if I help you help the good people, and you only kill the bad people, it will make up for all the bad stuff you’ve done.”

“I’m not sure what to say to that,” she said.

Henry just shrugged and went back to reading. The drove on in silence for awhile, until he broke it again, this time asking, “How much farther?”

“It’ll be awhile still.”

Around them the landscape began to change. From the dry deserts and shrublands of Texas, the plants began to get greener and more lush. They began to see more lakes and ponds alongside the road, until eventually they were driving through the bayous of Louisiana. The trees were huge and twisted here, and covered in scraggly stuff that Regina called Spanish moss. Even inside the truck, Henry could tell it was warmer here than it had been in New Mexico.

The city itself was sprawling and colorful. Henry set aside his comic book and pressed his face against the window to watch it all pass by. Everything was a mix of old and new. There were cathedrals that had seen centuries nestled right up against gas stations and nail salons. Stone angels with crumbling faces stood on pedestals covered in spray paint graffiti.

“What’re those things?” he asked as they drove by a field of small white buildings.

“Graves. The soil is too shallow to put people in the ground, so they just stick them on top here.”

They drove into the central city, to a neighborhood with bright buildings and elaborate iron railings on the balconies, and pulled up in front a pink house tucked behind a high metal fence. There was a little courtyard out front with a collection of potted plants and fountain with a statue of raven in the center. Regina was the first out of the truck. She got Hank’s leash and let him hop out after her. Henry hesitated, feeling suddenly nervous, though he wasn’t sure why. The building looked innocuous enough.

“Coming?” Regina asked. He took a deep breath and got out of the car, following her through the courtyard and up to the front door. A thick black awning gave them some relief from the Louisiana sun at least. The door knocker was styled in the shape of a snarling dragon’s head. Regina lifted her hand to use it, but the door opened before she got a chance.

“What the _fuck_ are you doing here?”

The woman who answered the door made Henry want to hide behind Regina, but he forced himself to stand still. She was tall and pale, with blonde hair that fell in perfect, neat waves around her face. She wore a black dress and a fancy black choker necklace that reminded Henry of a chandelier. Her southern accent was drawling and slow, but she said her words with precision. She looked from Regina to Henry, and when her eyes were on him, he felt like a rabbit being stared down by a fox.

“Hi, Mal,” said Regina.

“Oh, I cannot wait to hear what fucking mess you have gotten yourself into this time,” said the woman, Mal. Her arm was propped up against the doorframe.

“Can we come in?” Regina asked.

“Fine. Get in here,” she said, lowering her arm to let them pass.

“Thanks,” said Regina. She put a hand on Henry’s back and gently pushed him through the door, before following after him.

Walking into the house was like stepping into a horror movie taking place in the 1800s. Thick purple curtains covered every window and the only light came from an ornate chandelier hanging over the living room. The furniture was all pink or black and looked so fancy that Henry felt nervous at the thought of even sitting on it. The floor was completely covered in layered rugs, which along with the velvet curtains, muffled all sound within the room. Hank seemed to pick up on Henry’s discomfort and leaned against him.

“Want to tell me why you’re here?” Mal asked. She moved gracefully, like a video Henry had once seen of a jaguar, and sat down in a winged armchair. Regina fiddled with Hank’s lead for a moment.

“I just needed some advice.”

“It’s been a long time since you came to me for advice. I thought you were doing just fine on your own.”

“I’m not exactly on my own at the moment.” Regina sat on one the couches.

“Ah yes, the little snack. What’s your name?”

“Henry,” he said, choosing to look at his feet instead of at Mal.

“My name is Mallory St. Clair. Why don’t you give Regina and me a chance to talk in private. You can wait out in the courtyard if you want. And take the dog with you.”

Henry nodded, and took Hank back into the little front garden. He sat on the edge of the fountain, wishing he could know what they were talking about, but he was also glad to be out of that place. Mallory may be Regina’s friend, but she was creepy. A real crow landed on top of the stone one in the fountain and cawed. It tilted its head a few times back and forth, looking at Henry, and then flew away.

***

“A fucking human child, Regina. What the hell were you thinking bringing him here?”

“Did you expect me to leave him in the car? It’s like 100 degrees outside.”

“It’s barely 80. Don’t exaggerate,” said Mal, crossing her arms. “And just how did you end up in this situation?”

“I killed his foster parents.”

“Tell me you at least got rid of the evidence?”

“Yes, just like you taught me.”

“Good girl,” said Mal.

“And I couldn’t just leave him there alone. So I brought him with me. He’s a pretty good kid, but strange.”

“What do you mean?”

“He seems more aware of things than I would expect a ten year old to be,” said Regina.

“Do you think he’s a cryptid? He doesn’t smell like one.” She said it disdainfully, as if it were the worst thing in the world to smell like a human.

“I don’t know, but it does make me a little curious about his birth parents.”

“So what now? What the hell are you going to do with a child while you tour the country murdering people and fleeing as soon as you’re done? Even I know that’s a shit life for a child.”

“It’s better than where he came from.”

“Congratulations,” said Mal, with absolutely no emotion in her voice. “Well, you came for my advice, so here it is: wipe the kid’s memory, dump him at a baby drop, and go on your way.”

“I can’t do that,” said Regina, hissing a little as she said it.

“Then why the fuck did you ask for my advice? You knew what I’d tell you.”

“Well, I’m keeping the kid. But I could use your help. I may have gotten a bit sloppy with a kill before I got to the foster parents. I’m worried that-”

Mal stood from her chair, cutting Regina off from what she was saying.

“What the hell did you do, Regina?” She started to pace a little, hands on her hips. Regina watched from the couch, nervously twisting her hands together.

“I was just so hungry. He thought I was a prostitute, and I let him think that. So we went to a motel and I fed on him. But I couldn’t burn down the whole place, so I just burned him.”

“Jesus, you know there is nothing like an unusual death to get the B.C.C. on your back. Are they after you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” said Regina.

“Well, I’ll let you stay here tonight, but you better be gone by morning.”

Regina nodded. It was probably the best she could hope for.

***

Henry wasn’t thrilled about staying the night in Mallory’s creepy house, though he had to admit it was an interesting place. Regina was tired from the drive, and was napping in one of the guest rooms. Mal had given Henry one look up and down, told him not to touch anything, and then retreated upstairs. Henry walked around the house, not touching, but taking a good look at all the weird things that Mal had. Beyond the sitting room, he found a room with a harp and a piano, a dining room with a long table, and a several locked doors. There was kitchen with a bunch of old fashioned appliances that looked like they hadn’t been used in a decade, if ever. Only the fridge was modern, a big black shiny thing. Henry pulled it open to find stacks and stacks of blood bags, the kind that hospitals used. He shut the fridge quietly and continued his exploration, coming across a door in the back of the house that opened into a bright glass greenhouse. It was hot and humid inside, but he liked it more than the dark and silent rooms of the house.

Henry stopped and sniffed some little white flowers that looked like Queen Anne’s lace. There were also some pretty purple flowers, a dark purple tomato-shaped fruit, and green and red plant that looked like a vase with a leaf for a lid. He didn’t figure Mallory for much of a gardener, but she must have quite the green thumb to keep this place looking so beautiful. Hank whined a little from the doorway, refusing to step fully into the greenhouse. Henry sighed, but returned to the house. They went back to one of the houses long hallways, where Henry took a tennis ball out of his pocket to throw. Hank bounded down the hallway, his long ears flopping behind him and grabbed the ball. He chewed it a bit, giving the whole thing a nice layer of saliva before bringing it back to Henry.

“Gross.” Henry took the dripping ball and threw it, harder this time. It flew down the hallway, bouncing once and then ricocheting off the wall and through an open doorway.

That was strange.

Henry could have sworn that had been one of the locked doors last time he had checked. He walked over to it and looked at a stone staircase leading down into a dimly lit basement. Henry couldn’t see the ball from where he stood, so he slowly stepped down onto the first step. Hank whined again from behind him, but Henry continued downward, stepping carefully as if he feared the steps would crumble beneath him. He reached the bottom, finding himself in a hallway lined with shelves of wine and old barrels. There was a heavy wooden door at the end of it and there was some light streaming through the cracks. Henry spotted the green ball where it had rolled under one of the shelves and went to bend down and grab it. As he kneeled down, he heard a noise from behind the door, what sounded like a soft voice.

Henry debated with himself for a moment, but then curiosity won him over and he walked over to the door and pressed his ear against it. He could hear the voice, a little louder than before, but he still couldn’t quite make out what it was saying. He turned the knob and pushed it open as quietly as he could.

On the other side of the door was a small room with the same low ceiling as the hallway. The walls were decorated with paintings and old photographs of the same woman. She had reddish brown hair and a pretty heart-shaped face. Her eyes were dark and had a playful look, even in the old black and white photos from the days when no one used to smile. Henry could tell she was kind right away. His attention could not remain on the wall art, however, as there was something far more interesting happening in the center of the room. Mallory was standing with her back to him, leaning down over an open coffin. She was whispering quietly to whatever was inside. Henry moved forward, when she suddenly snapped upright.

“God, I can hear your little heart beating. What the hell are doing down here? I told you not to touch anything,” she said. She didn’t turn around.

“I’m sorry. I was playing with Hank and our ball rolled down the stairs.” Henry, perhaps against his better judgement, walked closer to her, close enough that he could make out what was in the coffin.

He gasped when he saw it. The figure inside was burned so badly that it was barely recognizable. The skin was a charred wreckage, the hair and eyes were gone, and so much of the cheek had burned away that he could see the teeth.

“Would you get out of here?” Mal asked. Her voice sounded strange. Strained, almost.

“Is that the lady in the pictures?” he asked going to stand beside Mal. He looked up at her to see her eyes were a little red and puffy. Mal rubbed at one of them and took a deep breath. She nodded.

“What happened to her?”

Mal’s shoulders slumped a little. “We’re not like Regina. We can’t walk in the sunlight like she can. If we try, it burns us up. But Rose got caught in the sunrise one day and by the time I found her, she was like this. I pulled her inside, but I didn’t get to her soon enough. She was moments away from dying, so we froze her, Regina and I. We just froze her in place, unable to die, unable to heal, just asleep. She doesn’t feel any pain.”

“Will she ever get better?”

“I’m trying, but…” Mal trailed off. Henry stood by her in silence and then reached out and took her hand. She tensed, as if she were going to yank her hand away from him, but she didn’t.

“Go on upstairs. I need another minute with her alone,” she said.

Henry nodded and left her with the coffin, only stopping a moment to grab Hank’s ball before running back up the stairs.

***

Mallory didn’t come out to say goodbye when they left early the next morning. Regina said that was just her way, that she didn’t care much for sentiment. Henry didn’t believe that. If keeping your injured girlfriend in a velvet coffin until you could heal her wasn’t sentimental, he didn’t know what was.

“I wish there was something we could do to help her and the burnt lady,” Henry said, once they were back in the truck.

“You met Rose?” Regina sounded truly surprised as she said it.

“Yep.”

“We haven’t found anything yet. They are incredibly strong vampires, but incredibly fragile. I don’t know if she’ll ever recover, but Mallory still has hope. You would have liked Rose. Mal was always more mellow and happier when she was around.” Regina got a far off sort of look on her face. Henry knew just by looking at the photographs that he would have liked Rose, and he wished there was a way to bring her back. Maybe someday he’d find a magic spell or something.

“What are we going to do now?” he asked.

“We’re going to go to a place that Mal told me about, a sort of haven for the strange and mythological beings. It’s up North, in Maine. Seems like a good place to lay low for awhile.”

“What’s it called?”

Regina pulled out a note from her pocket and read off it, “Storybrooke County.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No Emma this chapter, but she'll be back soon.  
> Maleficent (with a healthy dose of Pam De Beaufort) gets to make her grand entrance. Slightly different take on the whole sleeping beauty story, but I hope you liked it.  
> Also, if you were wondering, the comic Henry is reading is Saga and the plants in Mallory's garden were hemlock, deadly nightshade, and a carnivorous pitcher plant.  
> I think that's all for now!


	4. I'm Gonna Be

_ But the water does not look behind _

_ It flees, runs away further _

_ Where the eyes will not see her,  _

_ the water that wanders. _

Papusza, “The Water that Wanders”

***

Regina picked up some cds from a grocery store when they stopped to grab breakfast. She popped one into the disk player and a fast guitar song played out of the speakers. Henry thought the voice sounded familiar, but couldn’t name the singer. They rolled down the windows in the truck, letting the song flow out into the Louisiana streets.

“Who is this?” Henry asked.

“Johnny Cash,” said Regina. She tapped her thumb against the steering wheel in time to the music. 

Henry stuck his hand out the window, moving it up and down with the wind. “Is it going to be a long drive?” he asked.

“It will be. Maine’s pretty far away.”

“Can we stop some places?”

“Yeah, we’ll stop for food, and gas, bathroom breaks, maybe overnight. We’ll see.”

“What about just for fun?” He gave her his best puppy dog eyes. He had been practicing with Hank. She glanced over at him, looking confused.

“For fun?” she asked.

“Like on TV. When people go on roadtrips, they also go see things, like the largest ball of string, or the world’s smallest toothbrush.”

“You want to go to a bunch of roadside attractions?” Regina’s eyebrows raised, but she had a hint of smile.

“Yep.”

“Alright, kid, you’ve won me over. Any in particular you want to see?”

Henry just shrugged. He’d take whatever ones he could get.

“Ok, I’ve got an idea. Shouldn’t take us too far off course.”

***

“It’s a house,” said Henry, standing on the red brick walkway. It wasn’t a particularly large or impressive house, either. Compared to Mallory’s place, it was downright dinky. It was painted white and had green shutters and a little front porch. 

“Is it haunted?” he asked.

“No, this is where Johnny Cash was born.”

“The guy from the cd?”

“Yes, now go stand in front of it with Hank so I can take a picture,” said Regina. She had gotten a disposable camera when they stopped for gas so she could document their road trip properly. Henry went and sat on the porch, scratching Hank behind the ears. It was no giant ball of string, but it was alright.

***

“You’re lost, aren’t you?”

“I am not lost!”

Regina was growing more irritated as they drove down the narrow highway. They had gotten off the interstate miles back, after Regina said she knew a shortcut to take them east to Tennessee. It was dark now, but Henry was pretty sure they were heading north. The road was getting more winding, and the towns seemed to be growing farther apart, replaced by vast expanses of dark forest and moonlit cow fields.

“Where are we then?” he asked.

“We’re in Arkansas,” she snapped. She paused and then added, “You know, it’s harder to navigate from the ground. Usually I just fly around and I can see everything.”

Henry nodded, thinking it was better not to keep arguing. He leaned his head against the window and rested his eyes. He must have fallen asleep, because he was awoken with a jolt as the truck lurched to a stop.

“Wha’ happen’?” he asked, still sleepy and disoriented.

“We hit a deer,” Regina said. She told him to stay in the car and went out to check on it. A blast of cold air hit him when she opened the door and Henry pulled his jacket tighter around him. He could see the deer lying in the road. Its chest was rising and falling and it struggled to stand as Regina approached. Its front legs were still working fine, but it couldn’t get the back legs to move right. There was blood all over its hip. Regina took it by the head and snapped its neck. The deer collapsed down on the road, no longer struggling. She lifted it over her shoulder and took it around to the bed of the truck to throw it in.

“Poor young buck,” she said, getting back in the truck. Hank woke up and started sniffing at her hands and at the back window, smelling the dead deer.

“I thought bucks had antlers,” Henry said. He was still looking at the stain of blood on the pavement.

“Not in the winter. They shed them.”

Regina continued down the dark road, but it wasn’t long before she slammed on the brakes again. This time, Henry didn’t have to ask the reason she had stopped. He pressed himself back into his seat, pushing away from the creature that stood in the beam of the car headlights.

It was huge for one thing, at least as big as a bear, and covered in thick black hair. Its eyes reflected light like a cat’s. It had a gaping mouthing full of sharp teeth and two horns that curled over its head. It was panting and, with every breath, it exhaled a puff of steam. It stepped toward them and climbed up onto the hood of the car, causing the front to tip down under the creature’s weight.

“Stay still,” Regina said. She didn’t need to tell Henry. He was absolutely frozen. 

The creature continued up onto the roof and then into the bed of the truck. Hank yelped and jumped out of the backseat and into Regina’s lap. The creature seemed occupied, though, sniffing at the dead buck. It fastened its jaws around the deer’s neck and lifted it as if it weighed nothing. Then, it leapt out of the truck bed and ran into the woods without a look back. 

Regina let out a sigh and tried to calm Hank, who was crying and shaking in her lap.

“We may be lost,” she said.

***

After spending the night in a cheap motel, Regina and Henry managed to locate where they were in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas. They headed east, passing briefly through Missouri and into Kentucky. There, they stopped in a town called Louisville known for its famous trestle bridge. Regina pulled the truck over to the side of the road, right underneath the bridge. She got out and Henry followed her, looking up at the dark and rusty metal. She took his hand in hers.

“What’s so famous about it?” Henry asked. It just looked old as far as he could tell.

Regina pointed upward and then he saw it, a creature crawling lizard-like down one of the beams.

“They say there is a dangerous monster that lives on the bridge, a crazed thing that is more beast than human. It wields a bloody ax and murders unsuspecting people who walk under the bridge. Truly a horror,” she said, watching as the thing reached the bottom of the beam and stood upright on the ground. It began to walk toward them, with its head looking too big for its body.

“Do you want to know the truth?” Regina asked, grinning down at him with sharp white teeth. He nodded. 

“He’s nothing but a satyr who scares tourists and steals their wallets,” she laughed. 

The thing was close enough now that Henry could make out its features. Its head was so large because it was a goat’s head, with a furry snout, yellow eyes, and curling horns. It wore trousers, but no shirt, and carried only a black hat, no ax at all.

“How are you, Jefferson?” Regina asked, reaching her free hand out to shake the satyr’s.

He bleated and then his face morphed into a human face, that of a young man with curly black hair. He still had horns, though they were much smaller, and he covered them with the hat.

“Haven’t seen you in ages, Regina. How’s your dad?” Jefferson asked.

Regina’s smile fell and she looked at the ground. “He died. Last year.”

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I liked him. Well, who’s this?” He leaned down a bit to look at Henry.

“This is Henry. I picked him up in Wyoming. I’m looking after him now.” She pulled Henry a little closer to her.

“Well, nice to meet you, Henry. I have a daughter about your age. Name’s Paige. You two want to come ‘round for dinner? I won’t lie, I’m not the best cook, but you both look like you could use a little more meat on your bones,” said Jefferson.

Despite his initial fear, Henry was beginning to like the satyr. He was an odd one, whistling a strange tune the whole way home and stealing a few wallets from people they passed on the street. Still, he seemed good natured enough. His house was small, but clean, and it had a terrific garden, full of gnarled trees, fragrant herbs, and blooming dandelions, even in the middle of winter.

“Paige’s mom was a dryad. Paige inherited some of her abilities, and I’m not bad with the whole nature thing myself,” Jefferson said, when he noticed Henry admiring the garden.

Paige ran out to greet them, throwing herself at Jefferson in a hug. She was a year older than Henry and nearly a head taller, but he liked her instantly. She had little horns beginning to pop up through her blonde hair, which she was immensely proud of, and a mischievous grin that seemed to stay permanently on her face. Henry hadn’t had many friends at any of his schools, and other than foster siblings, he hadn’t spent much time with kids his own age. Talking to Paige, though, he wished she would be his friend. It made it all the more hard to leave after dinner. But Louisville was too exposed, too high-profile, Regina said, so they had to move on.

***

They were driving through West Virginia on a moonlit night when a bunch of little shadows passed in front of the moon. Regina told Henry that they were bats, high up in the sky and flying like, well, bats out of hell. Then a larger shape followed them. Henry only caught a glimpse of it, backlit for a brief moment by the moon. It had wings, for sure. It was vaguely humanoid in shape but looked like it had something protruding from its head, or possibly two somethings. Even without the moon, he could see its eyes, glowing red and moving through the sky after the bats.

***

In New Jersey, they saw a building named Lucy that was shaped like an elephant. Henry liked that one. He had been fond of elephants ever since he saw one at the zoo on a class trip. They got to walk around inside of it and climb to the houdah on the elephant’s back to look out on the town.

Unfortunately, when they were going through the Pine Barrens in the southern part of the state, they also saw what Henry could only describe as a horse-dragon. It was a monstrous thing, with cloven hooves, a long and sunken face, and leathery wings. It swooped down at the truck, but didn’t pursue them when Regina stepped on the gas and raced down the road.

“I’ve never seen a real monster before I met you, and now I’ve seen three on one road trip,” he said.

“It’s been more than that, hasn’t it?” Regina asked, still glancing in the rearview mirror from time to time to make sure the horse-dragon wasn’t following them.

“No. Mallory and Jefferson were a bit strange, but they’re not monsters.”

Regina was quiet for a moment. “Is it too scary? Seeing all these things.”

Henry shook his head emphatically. “Nope, I think you’re tougher than them.”

***

Emma and Graham were at least a day behind now. Their stop at the Tombstone branch of the Bureau had taken longer than expected, much longer than a simple drop off. The Tombstone agents were occupied at the time with a case of a rampaging desert sasquatch, which meant that Emma and Graham had had to process and contain the werewolves themselves. And, of course, there was the paperwork.

Emma didn’t think there was much hope for the Laroy foster boy. There were some cryptids that were slow eaters and took weeks between their meals, but most were rather voracious, and she could think of no other reason that the murderer would have taken him, other than to eat him. Still, the least they could do was find the killer and bring them to justice. The entire B.C.C. was aware of the missing boy, as were many police stations throughout Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado. There were probably posters and facebook posts about him, but again, Emma wasn’t hopeful.

The boy’s scent was fainter by the time they got back on the road, but there was enough for Graham to follow. They passed through Texas and down Louisiana, and Emma’s stomach sunk lower and lower as they moved out of the remote rural areas and onto more populated highways. Graham changed back into his human form and sat in the passenger seat with the window down, trying to focus on the scent as best he could. Then they arrived at New Orleans, the place they had both been dreading.

Nothing against the city itself, but the whole place was riddled with vampires, witches, bog beasts, and tricksters. There were so many cryptids packed into the place that all other smells were dominated by them. They drove around in circles for over an hour, covering the downtown and uptown neighborhoods, but Graham had lost the trail. They switched tactics, questioning cryptids and local police for any signs of the boy or the killer, but had no luck.

“Damn it,” Graham muttered under his breath. Emma had to agree.

They sat in the car a moment, Emma drumming her fingers against the dashboard and Graham frowning intensely out the window.

“We should call the boss,” he said.

Emma knew he was right, but she was dreading it nonetheless. She took out her cell phone and dialed the number. Better to just get it over with.

“Director White’s office, how can I help you?” said the chipper voice of the secretary.

“Hi, Belle. I need to talk to her.”

Isabelle French had been the director’s secretary for about as long as Emma could remember. She was clever and so organized that it was intimidating. She always seemed very sweet, but Emma knew she had a bit of a dark side that could flare up.

“I’ll transfer you through,” said Belle.

Emma waited as the call switched lines and the director answered the phone.

“Hi, Mom,” said Emma.

“Emma, what’s the update?” said Director White, straight to business. Her mother had been that way even before Emma had joined the Bureau, so she was well used it.

“The werewolves have been processed and incarcerated in Tombstone. Agent Humbert and I were able to follow the scent to New Orleans, but then we lost it.”

There was a pause before the director said, “I see. Any witnesses that could have seen them?”

“We asked the usual sources, Johnny the Rat, some of the vampires at Club La Morte, the Weird Sisters, but no one has seen the kid.” Emma shuffled her feet a little. She was nearly thirty, but somehow her mother still managed to make her feel like a grounded child.

“Right, better head back to headquarters, then. We’ll see if the oracle can tell us anything.”

Graham was watching Emma as she hung up the phone. Due to his exceptional hearing, she didn’t need to tell him what the director had said. 

“DC, here we come,” he said, sounding far more upbeat than she felt. Emma put the car in drive and they rolled out of the parking lot. Phone calls were one thing, but seeing her mother in person was quite another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Five points if you can name all the cryptids on the road trip  
> Thanks for reading!


	5. Gods and Monsters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've got quite a few new characters in this one! New to this story, that is, but familiar to the show.
> 
> Also, the cryptids from last week were:  
> 1\. Ozark Howler in Arkansas  
> 2\. The Pope Lick Monster in Kentucky (aka Jefferson)  
> 3\. The Mothman in West Virginia  
> 4\. The Jersey Devil in New Jersey

_The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable._

Oscar Wilde

***

Killian Jones was drunk. He staggered down the street without a clue where in the city he was exactly, but not too worried about it. He did want to go for a swim in the Charles River Basin, and that meant he should head north. Or maybe south. Was he in Cambridge? He swayed a little and felt his stomach lurch. He stopped and bent over, worried he was going to vomit, but the feeling passed, so he carried on walking and singing down the street.

“Oh, you’re drunk, you’re drunk, you silly old fool, still you cannot see. That is but a candle that my mother gave to me, oh something something I’ve travelled, a hundred miles or moooore. But a candle with hair, I’ve never seen before.” His words came out slurred as he sang loudly and off key. His Irish accent grew even thicker with each line of the song.

“Good lord, you look absolutely wrecked,” said a voice from behind him. A prim and proper sort of voice. An English voice, full of condescension and haughtiness.

Killian switched songs and sang out, “Oh, go home British soldiers, go on home. Have you got no fuckin’ homes of yer own. For 800 years, we’ve fought ye without fear, and we’ll fight ye for 800 more!”

“Are you just here to be a complete stereotype? You aren’t even in Ireland anymore,” she said.

Killian turned to face her, both of her. Two images of the woman floated in front of him. He closed one eye, so that there was only one, standing with her hands on her hips. She was pretty, in an angry sort of way, with thick brown hair, blue eyes, and severe cheekbones. If he didn’t hate her so much, he might actually like her.

“Did you just come here to yell at me? Because I’ve had enough of it. What is it that you want, Milah?” he asked her.

“No, I didn’t just come here to yell at you, you drunken fool. You still owe me a favor, remember? I’m calling it in.” She stepped closer to him and he tried very hard not to fall over.

She was right, though. A few months back he had gotten into a bit of a tight spot with some redcaps who managed to get a bridle on him. He was a kelpie, a water horse who could take the shape of a man when he need to, and kelpie were not fond of bridles, unsurprising given that they had to do the bidding of whoever got the bridle on them. Milah had swooped in, however, and killed all the redcaps, releasing Killian. He was grateful to her for rescuing him, but that didn’t mean he was pleased about this owing-her-a-favor business. He was kind of hoping that they could just sleep together and forget the whole thing, but Milah had too good a memory, it seemed.

“What is it, then?” he asked.

“There’s going to be a fox hunt. A little fox tried to steal something from the fairy prince, but the guards have caught her. Tomorrow night, they’re going to have the hunt in Wompatuck State Park. Winner’s prize is worth having: the Ring of Dispel and two thousand pounds. So I need a fast horse.” She smiled.

“You’ll take the ring, then, and I get the two thousand quid?”

“In your dreams. I’ll give you five hundred, but the rest is mine. You owe me one.”

Killian sighed, but she wasn’t wrong. He didn’t like the hunts, but if it would get her off his back, it would be worth it. He chuckled to himself, getting her off his back by getting her onto it.

“Alright, you’re on,” he said, reaching out his hand to shake her own.

***

Regina and Henry stopped in Boston for dinner. Regina had wanted to avoid the big city and its terrible traffic, but Henry was determined to see it. He had also insisted on going through New York City and seeing the Statue of Liberty, which along with their various other detours had turned their quick road trip to Maine into a several day affair. But Henry seemed happy, so she supposed there was no rush. They found a place called Fitzgerald’s for dinner, an Irish pub with a little leprechaun on its sign. It wasn’t the swankiest place, but it was the only one that would let Hank inside, and they didn’t want to leave him in the car. They found a small table toward the back, away from the blasts of cold air from the front door. Regina had to admit, too, that the food smelled incredible. She order a guiness and a shepherd’s pie, feeling her stomach grumbling as she handed her menu over to the waiter.

There was a live band playing in one corner, a fast and upbeat tune about a funeral. Henry tapped his foot along with the music, busy drawing in his sketchbook. Regina noticed that he was documenting all the creatures they had seen, the shaggy horned beast in Arkansas, Jefferson in satyr form, and the flying shape in West Virginia. He was currently working on the horse-dragon from New Jersey.

“Did you see the Jersey Devil?” asked the waiter when he brought out their food.

“What?” asked Regina.

He pointed to Henry’s drawing. “Looks like him, the Beast of the Pine Barrens.”

“Yep,” said Henry, still focused on his drawing. The waiter chuckled and told them to enjoy. Henry finished the wing that he was drawing and set his sketchbook aside to dig into his plate of fish n’ chips. Hank stood up and sniffed at Henry’s plate and Henry snuck him a french fry. Regina took Hank’s bowl and a ziplock of kibble from her purse and set up the dog’s dinner under the table.

Fitzgerald’s was a pretty lively place, with several people getting up to dance in front of the band and others whistling and clapping along from the bar. There was one young woman, though, who didn’t seem to be partaking in all the revelry. She was slumped in her barstool, nursing what looked like whiskey. Her pale eyes were red rimmed and puffy as if she had been crying. Henry noticed her a few seconds after Regina and he began to kick Regina lightly under the table.

“What?” she asked.

“This is your chance,” he said, looking expectant.

She frowned at him. “My chance?”

“Your chance to do some good. She probably needs some help. So?”

Regina sighed, but after spending days in a car with the kid, she knew he didn’t give up easily.

“Alright, fine,” she said. She got up and went over to the bar. The woman looked up at her.

“Sorry to bother you. It’s just, you look like you’re having a rough time. I just wanted to see if you were ok. My, um, kid was worried.” Regina nodded back to Henry, who waved at them with a big smile on his face.

“I’m fine. It’s nothing you can help with,” said the woman. She was Irish, and her voice came out strained and a bit rough.

“You might be surprised,” said Regina. She didn’t want to pry, but she did feel a strange pull toward the woman. It surprised her. The young woman was cute, but not really Regina’s usual type. She tended to go more for tough blondes, often a little on the mean side.

The woman watched Regina’s reaction, then leaned in closer and said under her breath, “Are you-? I mean, you’re not human?”

That startled Regina.

“How can you tell?” she asked.

“Let’s just say that I can have an effect on humans, but most other cryptids are able to resist it somewhat. The fact that you didn’t turn into a blushing idiot when you met me is usually a pretty clear indicator.”

“Let’s sit and talk,” said Regina. The woman followed her to the table with Henry and Hank. Henry grabbed an empty chair for her from another table and she sat, still eyeing Regina with curiosity.

“So you know I’m not human, but can you tell what I am?” Regina asked.

“No idea,” said the woman.

“She’s a vampiric witch,” Henry said, a little too loudly. Regina hushed him.

“My name is Regina Mills. This is Henry-”

“Mills. Henry Mills,” he said quickly.

Regina raised her eyebrows for a moment, but went along with it.

“And that’s Hank,” she finished. Hank had already put his head in the woman’s lap and was drooling a little on her dress.

“Aurora McNamara.” She looked a little nervous then, or at least unsure of what to say next.

“Ok, Aurora, why don’t you tell us what happened,” said Regina, as gently as she could.

Aurora took a deep breath and then launched into her story. She was a selkie, a seal shifter, born in Ireland, but she had come to Boston after her mom died. There were plenty of harbor seals all over the coastline, so it was an easy place to live as a selkie. To take human form, all she had to do was take off her seal skin and keep it in a safe place until she was ready to return to the sea. At least, that was how it had been until she had gotten into some debt with a fairy prince and he had taken her seal skin as payment.

Henry paused the story, surprised that a fairy had been responsible.

“They aren’t like what you see in stories and paintings. They aren’t little and cute with pretty butterfly wings. They’re tall and pale and powerful. They know all sorts of magic and they hate being robbed. They take what they’re owed any way they can,” said Aurora. She continued with the tale. Not long after she lost her skin, she met a fox spirit named Hua Mulan. She was an immigrant, too, but from China. They had become fast friends and then girlfriends and Aurora had finally told Mulan about her lost pelt. Fox spirits were clever and good at sneaking into places, so Mulan had tried to steal back the skin from the fairy prince. But fairies were not easy to trick, and they had caught her. Now, the prince had called a hunting party together, open to all the fairies, sluagh, and creatures in Boston. They were going to release Mulan and chase her down, and the one that killed her was going to get the grand prize: a ring that repelled magic and a bag of money.

“When is this supposed to happen?” Regina asked.

“Tomorrow night,” said Aurora, burying her face in her hands.

Regina did not want to stay in Boston that long, but the way Henry was looking at her meant that he had made up his mind.

 _Goddamnit_ , she thought.

***

Mulan was shaking in her cell, a small stone room with only a cot and a toilet. There was no heating and only the thinnest of blankets on her cot. She had turned into her fox form, which was somewhat warmer, but the Boston winters were brutal. She tucked her fluffy tail around herself, trying to pull as much warmth as she could from it. She was angry at herself. She had never gotten caught before, but then again, she had also never encountered fairies before. Her mother would be so disappointed. Captivity was a horrible place for her kind.

The fairy prince came to look at her from time to time, sometimes alone, sometimes with an entourage of other fairies. He was tall, with long white hair, though he didn’t look old. His skin was white, too, as if the sun had never touched it, paler than some of the vampires Mulan had seen. It was his eyes, though, that were the most unsettling. He didn’t have irises, only the small black points of his pupils looked out from white eyes. He wore a fine suit and a dark metal crown and grinned like a snake at her. She growled at him and he always laughed. The other fairies with him were just as pale and sinister looking. The one that was most frequently at his side had blue-tinted hair and a larger crown than his own. Mulan thought she must be the fairy queen. Not the real fairy queen, of course. Aurora had told her that the real fairy queen was still in Ireland, presiding over a huge court of fairies, kelpies, selkies, leprechauns, and hosts of other strange and wonderful beings. This Bostonian royal family was nothing but a group of posers, throwing their power around.

Mulan stopped growling and turned her back to the fairies who watched her. She closed her eyes, not knowing how she was going to get out of this one.

***

“Jesus, fuck,” said Regina when they arrived at Wompatuck State Park, the site of the wild hunt. She was expecting maybe a dozen hunters to compete, but apparently there were more cryptids in Boston than she had thought. The starting field was absolutely full of all sorts of creatures. There were several graceful, pale beings on beautiful white horses, whom Regina thought must be the fairies. Behind them, on massive black steeds, were several headless riders, brandishing metal whips and axes, the dullahan. Many cloaked members of the sluagh, the restless dead, were riding a myriad of ghostly horses and other strange animals. Running around under the horses’ feet were shaggy black dogs and slim white hounds with red ears. One of the fairies had a cockatrice on her arm. It was strange thing, like chicken that had remembered it had once been a dinosaur. It flicked its scaly tail and shrieked, revealing a row of sharp teeth. Regina could sense a spell blanketing the entire park, hiding them all from any human eyes.

There also seemed to be a crowd of people gathered on the edge of the lawn to watch and cheer on the contestants. Aurora took Henry and Hank over to stand with them, leaving Regina to walk over to the crowd of hunters. Regina was one of the only ones that did not have a horse, which gave her some strange looks from the rest of the hunters. She did see two others, though, who were unmounted, an Irish man and an English woman who were arguing over a bridle.

“Just accept it!” the English woman barked out.

The man sighed but he bent over and shifted into a horse, a gray one with a black mane and tail, shinier than a horse should be and with a bigger mouth. A kelpie. Aurora had told her about what sort of creatures to expect on the hunt. Regina just wished Aurora had known how fucking many of them were going to show up.

There was trumpeting sound and a cheer rose up from the crowd. Four dullahan walked through the hunters, carrying a palanquin with two fairies inside. They walked to the front of the crowd and set down the palanquin. The fairies climbed out, a young man with white hair and a slightly older woman with blue hair. The man held up a cage holding a little red fox and the hunters began to cheer even louder. The blue haired woman raised her hands and the crowd went silent.

“This demon tried to steal the property of my dearest son. For that, she must be punished. But, we are not unreasonable. She will be given a chance. If the demon reaches the oldest oak tree on the far side of the park, then she is free. But if one of you should kill her, then you will win the great prize, Lancelot’s Ring of Dispel!” She held up a silver ring in a gloved hand and the crowd burst into applause.

“The demon will have one minute head start,” called the prince. He unlatched the cage and the fox burst through the open door, leaping onto the ground and sprinting away toward the forest. The dogs began barking, but their owners held them back. Some of the horses reared up in excitement. As the minute came to an end, the prince raised his arms up in the air. The crowd stilled for a moment, and then he brought his arms down and they surged forward, a crazed mass of bloodthirsty hunters.

Regina leapt into the air and turned into a vulture, soaring up above the crowd. She was glad not to be in the middle of it all. Mulan may be the main target, but the hunters had no problem taking out their competition if needed. She watched one of the dullahan throw his whip around a cloaked member of the sluagh and yank him off his mount. A black dog, at its fairy owner’s command, leapt up and tore into the throat of another hunter’s horse. It was turning into a bit of a bloodbath, but Regina supposed that would work in Mulan’s favor. The hunters plunged into the forest and started to break apart to search for Mulan. Regina dipped down lower as she flew over the woods, not quite sure how she was going to find Mulan in the thick trees. She swooped and landed on a tree branch and scanned the forest, switching on her vampire vision. She could see the circulatory systems of the deer and squirrels that ran through the trees, frantic to get away from the crazed hunters. Nothing that looked like a fox, though.

She flew up again and went to check another part of the forest. No luck. She went west, and this time she saw something. It was human shaped, but it was crouched in a tree, as if waiting for something. Regina blinked, letting her vision return to normal. She could see a black haired woman holding tight to a branch and watching the ground. Regina recognized her as Mulan from a picture that Aurora had showed her.

A rider began to approach below them, a dullahan. Mulan seemed completely focused on him and hadn’t noticed Regina yet. Mulan waited for the dullahan to pass under the tree and then she leapt forward. She grabbed a lower tree branch, swinging her legs to kick the dullahan solidly in the chest, knocking him off of the horse. Mulan then landed on the horse’s back and dropped down into the saddle. The horse reared, kicking out its huge feet, but she managed to urge it forward into a gallop. The dullahan got up and threw his ax at her, but it missed and landed deep in a tree trunk. Regina laughed and flew down as a vulture, raking her talons across the dullahan’s shoulder before following after the horse.

Regina wasn’t fast enough flying in the thick of the forest, so she had to fly up above the trees and catch up to Mulan from above. She dove down and landed behind Mulan on the horse, turning back into human form as she did so. Mulan, without any hesitation, drove her elbow into Regina’s nose, almost knocking her off the horse.

“Wait, wait, I’m, um, here to rescue you. I’m friends with Aurora,” Regina said, holding her face. Fox spirits could really pack a punch.

“Oh...thanks,” said Mulan, glancing behind her.

“Doesn’t seem like you need much help, though.”

Mulan just shrugged and urged the horse to go faster.

“Do you know where this oak tree is?” she asked.

“No, but Aurora said not to trust the fairies, that they have no intention of letting you go,” Regina said. She had to duck under a low branch as she spoke.

“Fairies can’t lie,” said Mulan.

“But they can deceive. Letting you ‘go free’ might not mean what you think. Let’s just make a run for it.”

Mulan thought about for a second, and seemed about ready to agree, when a lightning bolt went flying past them and caused a tree to explode. The dullahan’s horse screamed, but kept running. Regina looked behind them, seeing the kelpie and the English woman hot on their heels. The dullahan’s horse was big and strong, but the kelpie was definitely faster.

“Keep going,” said Regina, before leaping off the horse. She glided back as a vulture and crashed straight into the kelpie, latching onto his shoulder. He twisted and bucked, throwing the English woman from his back. Regina turned humanoid, hissing loudly, and bit into the neck of the kelpie. He fell to the ground, turned back into his human form, and managed to get free of Regina’s grasp. He held his hands up surrendering.

“Get up and fight, you coward!” the English woman screamed at him.

“I’m not dying for this,” he said. Then he caught sight of Regina and said, “God, her face,” with a look of horror on his own. His neck was bleeding and a part of Regina wanted to finished him off, but the woman was of more concern.

Regina advanced on the woman, who shot another bolt of lightning from her fingertips. Lightning was close enough to fire, though, and Regina was good with fire, so she just knocked it to the side. She grabbed the woman by the collar, watching her heart beating faster and faster and her blood rushing through her jugular vein. Regina sunk her teeth into the woman. She could hear hoofbeats as the kelpie ran away from them. Regina didn’t care, though, as she had lost all interest in him. She drank and drank, then ripped into the woman’s chest and ate her heart. She cleaned up her fingers and face and flew up to find Mulan again. She spotted her about a mile outside the park, still riding the horse at a dead run down the street.

“You’re covered in blood, you know,” Mulan said, when Regina landed behind her.

“Damn, I thought I got it all,” Regina said, rubbing furiously at her mouth.

They circled around in a wide arc, back toward Boston to meet up with Henry and Aurora at Fitzgerald’s.

***

Once the wild hunt entered the forest, none of the crowd could see what was happening, though they could still hear some of the yells and cries rising out of the trees.

“Do you think they made it out?” Aurora asked.

“Yep, I know they did,” said Henry. Aurora didn’t seem convinced, but she forced a small smile anyway.

“Let’s go wait for them. I don’t like the way the prince is watching us,” she said. The fairy prince and the queen had stayed behind with their dullahan guards and a retinue of servants. The prince was staring at Aurora with a small smile playing on his colorless lips. Henry shuttered a little and followed Aurora back to her car.

They drove back to Boston without a word. Aurora seemed too nervous to talk, so Henry turned the radio on to fill the silence.

Fitzgerald’s looked pretty much the same as it had the night before, except for the massive black horse tied up outside the building. Henry went over to pet it, only able to reach about halfway up the horse’s shoulder. Hank was a little hesitant, but he sniffed the horse and began wagging his tail when it sniffed him back. Aurora stared at it, twisting her hands together and then ran into the pub.

Henry followed just in time to see Aurora throwing her arms around Mulan. He grinned and went over to where Regina was sitting and drinking a beer. Her clothes looked a little torn and dirty and there was a leaf in her hair, but she smiled back at him.

“You did it,” he said.

“Yep, piece of cake.” She patted the barstool next to her for him to sit. They could hear Mulan and Aurora talking softly to each other. Mulan was apologizing for failing to steal back the seal skin.

“Shh, it doesn’t matter,” said Aurora. There were tears falling down her face.

Regina let them have a moment together and then went over to them, with Henry following, of course.

“Listen, I don’t know what your plans are, but those fairies seem to be pretty powerful around these parts. You might want to think about getting out of town,” she said.

“You could come with us. We’re going to Storybrooke County, Maine,” said Henry. Regina gave him a look and he smiled sheepishly up at her. He knew she didn’t like him telling people their plans. Still, Mulan and Aurora were nice. He nudged her a little.

“Really?” asked Aurora.

“Apparently,” said Regina.

***

Regina had declared no more tourist stops on the trip, ready to get to Maine as soon as possible, so they had stocked the F150 full of food and they were powering through the night. Mulan and Aurora were sharing the passenger seat, while Henry slept in the back with Hank. The dullahan’s horse was eating hay in the horse trailer they had “borrowed” on their way out of Boston.

“Are you two running from something?” asked Aurora, breaking the silence in the truck.

Regina frowned. Mulan and Aurora seemed trustworthy enough, and she had helped Mulan escape capture from the wild hunt, but she wasn’t positive just how much she wanted them to know about her and Henry.

“Why do you ask?”

Aurora shrugged and said, “Most people racing up the interstate to Storybrooke County are running from something.”

Regina tapped the steering wheel, wishing she had come up with a backstory before hand. Henry sat up in the backseat and stretched.

“We’re just looking for a fresh start,” she said.

“What about you, Henry? Are you a vampire like your mom?” Aurora asked. She asked a lot of questions. She was probably just being polite, making small talk, but it still made Regina nervous. Then again, most things surrounding Henry made her nervous. Mulan was more stoic, and hadn’t said much throughout the drive.

“Nope, I’m just a kid,” he said, perhaps sounding a little disappointed.

“Was your father human?”

“Oh, um, I don’t know. I’m...adopted,” said Henry. Saying Regina had adopted him was a nicer way to put it than she had murdered his legal guardians and then technically but consensually kidnapped him.

“We’ve talked about adopting some day. You’re lucky to have each other,” said Mulan.

Behind them all the horse whinnied loudly.

“We should give her a name, can’t keep just calling her the dullahan’s horse,” said Aurora, and Regina was relieved for the change of subject.

“Midnight?” said Mulan.

“No, too obvious.”

“Snowball?” suggested Regina.

Aurora laughed, but rejected that one, too.

They went through several suggestions, with Henry throwing in his vote for “Daisy.” In the end, they settled on “Connie.” Regina wasn’t crazy about it, but the others seemed to like it, and she was outvoted. Connie, the terrifying dullahan’s horse. It didn’t quite strike fear into the heart.

Regina got distracted from her thoughts about horse-naming, however, as they passed a “Welcome to Maine” sign. They were almost there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The look of the fairies is based on a gorgeous painting called "Fairys and the Peasant Girl" by Yuliya Litvinova.  
> Comments are more than welcome!


	6. Renegade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update. I've been kind of swamped with finals.

_ Hope had been his enemy, a frailty that he must at all costs master, for so long now that it was a moment before he was willing to concede that he had let it back into his heart. _

Michael Chabon,  _ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay _

***

The headquarters of the Bureau of Cryptid Concealment was an utterly impressive structure, but one that few ever got to see. It was hidden deep in the earth below Washington DC, protected by massive doors of iron, silver, and steel, a plethora of defense spells, and a top of the line security system. Nothing, human or cryptid, had a chance in any of the hells of breaking in. It was intimidating in a way - stark, cold, and military. Emma much preferred to be out in the field and avoided headquarters when she could help it. Besides, at headquarters she had to wear a suit instead of her usual leather jacket and jeans, and she never liked that. 

It didn’t help that the Bureau’s director, Mary Margaret White, and top agent, David Nolan, were her parents. They weren’t bad parents exactly, but the weight of their expectations, and the expectations of everyone because of them, was just overwhelming at times. There had never been any question that Emma would one day work for the B.C.C. During her childhood, it seemed as inevitable as breathing. When she joined, though, she had purposefully changed her name to Swan because she didn’t want people to instantly think of her parents when they met her. They still did, of course. Everyone knew she was Emma Nolan-White, but it made her feel better to be Swan.

“You look tense,” said Graham as they walked down the echoing hallway.

“I don’t know what you mean. I’m completely calm,” she said, in a completely not calm manner.

He chuckled a bit at that.

They rounded the corner and arrived at the office of the director. Belle French was sitting at a desk in front of the office, though it was actually a little difficult to see her, as the desk was absolutely covered in potted plants, leaving only enough room to fit her tablet and a lamp. 

“Go on in. She’s expecting you,” said Belle from behind the foliage.

Emma led the way into the office. Inside, it was large and traditional, with a dark wooden desk, mahogany bookshelves, and leather chairs. There was a large screen on the opposite wall to the desk. The painting, “The Ride of the Valkyrie” by William Maud hung on the wall over the director’s chair.

The director was sitting down, but stood to her full height when they arrived. And it was an impressive height. Emma was tall enough, but her mother was well over six feet. She had short black hair and a sweet, youthful face that didn’t quite match her demeanor. She walked over to give Emma a hug and shook Graham’s hand.

“Director, good to see you,” said Graham.

“Please, call me Mary Margaret. Let’s go see the oracle, then,” she said. She grabbed a sketchpad and swept out of the office. Emma had learned a long time ago not to expect any small talk from her mother. 

“Belle, make sure the transfer goes through today,” Mary Margaret said, pausing at the secretary’s desk.

“Yes, ma’am, I’ve already done it,” said Belle. She was busy pruning a bonsai tree and only gave a quick glance up at them.

“Transfer?” Emma asked.

“We’re bringing the young werewolf, Ruby Lucas, here for rehabilitation,” said Mary Margaret. She led the way through the hallways until they reached the elevator. The director’s office was on the floor closest to the surface, but the oracle preferred to be farther down, as deep as she could go, underneath ever the holding cells for criminal cryptids.

“I’m sorry your father isn’t in town. He’s working a case in Denver,” said Mary Margaret as they descended.

“Well, tell him I’m sorry I missed him,” said Emma, more out of courtesy than real feeling.

The elevator dinged and opened onto a cavern, lit only by candles. It was a disconcerting contrast to step from the shiny metal of the modern elevator and onto the rough stone of the cavern. The oracle was sitting before them, perched on a tall three legged chair that spanned over a crack in the ground. Smoke was rising from the crack and she was breathing it in deeply. She wore a white dress and had a white cloth over her eyes, or over where her eyes would be if she had them. Her hair was wild and bright red and she had a tattoo of an eyeball on the palm of each hand. She climbed down from the chair as they approached, but instead of going over to them, she lay down next to the crack and pressed her ear to the rocky ground, listening to something none of them could hear.

“Everything alright, Cassandra?” Mary Margaret asked her.

“Things are...stirring,” said the oracle.

“We need some information about a missing boy and an escaped murderer,” said Mary Margaret. She handed a photograph of Henry to the oracle, who ran her hand over it. 

“Interesting. Interesting boy,” she said. She began to laugh, and the sound echoed all over the cavern. They didn’t question her. The oracle tended to give them only the information they needed at the time and never anything extra. 

“Let’s take a look, then, through the eyes of our family.” Cassandra sat up and crossed her legs. Beneath the white cloth, her eye sockets began to glow. Emma sat down, as well. This part could take awhile. She wished she got service down here, so she could check her texts. Instead, she pulled up candy crush and began to play, ignoring the look her mother was giving her.

It took over twenty minutes, but then the oracle saw something. Mary Margaret quickly handed her the sketchbook.

“Yes, yes, they were seen by one of the Ozark howlers.” The oracle began to draw, holding a pencil in one hand and running the other hand over the paper as she worked. The scene she was drawing began to take form. It was a truck with bright headlights on a road at night. Emma could tell that there were two figures in the cab of the truck, but couldn’t make out their faces clearly. The one on the passenger side was smaller. It could be Henry. 

“Any chance you got a license plate on that?” Emma asked.

“She did not see,” said Cassandra. Emma had figured as much. Ozark howlers weren’t really concerned with such things.

The oracle kept looking and this time found something much faster.

“A sylph in West Virginia saw them, too. The one they call ‘mothman.’” The oracle turned the page and drew the truck again, this time a side view. Henry was clearly recognizable in this one, with his face pressed against the window, but the driver was still too obscured by darkness to see.

“When was this?” Graham asked, pulling out a notepad from his pocket.

“One day, two days, maybe five.”

“Great, that’s great.” He flipped the notepad closed again.

The third time she finally found something useful.

“Jefferson,” said the oracle.

“The satyr? He’s on our watch list. He’s higher profile than he should be, the so-called Pope Lick Monster,” said Mary Margaret.

“He saw them?” asked Emma.

The oracle began to laugh again. “He invited them for dinner.” She leant back over the sketchbook, drawing furiously. When she finished, she ripped the page out and handed it to Emma, who took it and examined the face. It was a woman, about Emma’s age, maybe younger, with a scar over her lip. She had intense eyes and a perfect nose. She was beautiful.

“We have our killer,” said Graham, looking over Emma’s shoulder.

“Regina,” said the oracle, “he called her Regina.”

“Do you know where they’re going?” Mary Margaret asked.

The oracle nodded, smiling to herself. She twirled one index finger in circles and then pointing it upward. “North. They’re going to Maine.”

Emma knew what was coming next and dreaded it.

“Storybrooke County.”

“Of course,” said Mary Margaret with a sigh. “Well, you two had better leave now. I’ll send another team to detain Jefferson.”

“I hear Boston is lovely this time of year,” called the oracle, as they were beginning to walk back to the elevator.

“And visit Boston on your way,” said Mary Margaret.

Emma and Graham nodded and left the oracle’s chamber, happy to get out of the dank and sinister air of the place.

***

Storybrooke was one of the easternmost counties in Maine, right along the Atlantic Ocean. Despite being a coastal county, it was sparsely populated, with some small towns scattered throughout, but most of it consisted of deciduous forest and potato farms. They picked one of the beach towns at random, a place called New Erland. There was a cute sign welcoming them to the town, but someone had spray painted over half of the “w,” so that it looked like “NevErland.” They passed a rocky stretch of beach and a harbor that Aurora stared at longingly, and then turned up the Main Street of the town.  

“It’s...quaint,” said Regina, eyeing the clocktower and neat storefronts.

“I like it,” said Henry. He liked everything.

“Right, well, we should find a hotel or something. Stay there until we get something more permanent.”

She pulled up to a little coffee shop. Hopefully they could get some breakfast there and ask about places to stay. It would give the animals a chance to stretch their legs, too. Mulan went to unload Connie and tie her up on a bike rack while the rest went into the coffee shop. The barista frowned at Hank and Connie, but didn’t say anything, so they went ahead and ordered. The coffee shop didn’t have a wide selection of food, but they had the basics: muffins, banana bread, and yogurt. 

“Any good hotels around here? Actually, they don’t need to be good, just cheap,” asked Regina.

The barista was about to answer when one of the other customers beat her to it. He was a small man in a fine suit and had a faint Scottish accent. 

“How long are you planning to stay here?” he asked.

“We’re planning to move here, actually. Just need a place to stay until we get a place of our own,” Regina said, looking over the man carefully. She didn’t sense anything odd, but that didn’t mean much. Cryptids were, by definition, pretty good at hiding themselves.

“Take my card. You can come by later and I’ll help you find a place.” He held out a black business card with gold lettering.

“Gold’s Pawn Shop. We need a hotel, not a bunch of nicknacks.”

“Just come,” he said. The barista handed him a coffee in a to-go cup and he left. Henry pressed closer to Regina as he passed by them and Aurora frowned as she watched him go.

“Do you know what he was?” Regina asked Aurora.

“Nope. Powerful, I think.”

“That’s Mr. Gold,” said the barista, “He owns this place.”

“The coffee shop?” Regina asked.

“The town. He’s in real estate. The pawn shop is just a side hustle. If you want a place, though, he’s the man to see.” The barista turned away then, going to make their coffees.

***

After breakfast, Regina went off to the pawn shop alone, leaving Mulan and Aurora to look after Henry and the animals. They found a park where they could walk Connie and Henry could play fetch with Hank. Even covered in snow and with the barren trees, it was a beautiful place, less manicured than the parks in Boston. There was even a frozen lake with some kids ice skating over it. Connie sniffed at the snow, and seemed disappointed that there was no grass for her to graze on.

“What do you think about this place?” Mulan asked.

“You mean, what do I think about living here permanently?” 

Mulan nodded.

“We had good friends in Boston, but I think this is the safest place for us now,” said Aurora. 

“Regina seems to be a good ally to have. She’s strong. She took down a lampad nymph and a kelpie during the wild hunt.”

“I think Henry is interesting, too.” Aurora watched him as he went running after Hank and slipped a little in the snow.

“Henry? Isn’t he just a human kid?”

“He’s interesting,” was all Aurora said.

Mulan shrugged. If the kid was cryptid, he should fit right in to this place. She scratched Connie on the rump and then noticed that her hand came away with some black flakes on it.

“What the hell?” she said, showing it to Aurora.

Aurora went up and ran her hand over the horse’s shoulder and looked at her hand, the palm of which was also covered in black.

“Look at her feet,” Aurora said, pointing. The snow where the mare was standing had been tinted black and her feet were starting to turn gray.

“It’s paint. The dullahan painted her,” Mulan said.

Aurora had to laugh. “What a fucking poser. Do you think they all do that? Can’t be a proper dullahan without a black horse.”

“I wonder what she really looks like under there.”

“Let’s find out,” said Aurora.

They got Henry and went to find a self service car wash, one with hot water and an air dryer. One of the other customers was a little bewildered when they came in with a horse instead of a car, but most of the others didn’t even bat an eye. Henry was delighted by the hose, so Mulan let him wash Connie’s legs and then picked him up so he could get her back and sides. Black water ran off of her, leaving behind a rich brown coat. They took the air dryer and gave her a good blow dry, so that she didn’t get too cold. Then they stopped to take a good look at her. She was a good looking horse, a dark bay with white feet and a wide white blaze.

“Can I ride her?” Henry asked.

“Sure, she’s pretty easy going, despite being a monster horse,” said Mulan. She picked him up again so that he could climb onto Connie’s wide back. Connie snorted a little, but stayed still. Mulan wondered if she even registered the kid as a weight on her. She kept hold of the reins, though, just in case.

“Alright, Sir Henry, where to?”

“Onward to victory!” he said, pointing straight ahead.

***

The little bell on the pawn shop door tinkled as Regina entered. Inside, it was about what she would expect, stuffed full old jewelry and electronics, as well as a few more unusual objects, notably the creepiest pair of marionettes she had ever seen. Mr. Gold was standing behind the counter, watching her expectantly.

“Welcome, Ms. - actually I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Mills, but Regina is fine.”

“Welcome, Regina.” He opened up a binder on the counter. “Now, there are several properties that may be of interest to you. I assume you’ll want a house with a good sized yard, possibly a barn for the horse.” He began to flip through pages, each containing pictures and information on properties. “Will you all be living together?”

“I think so. None of us are exactly flush with cash at the moment, but together we can afford a place. And we’ll get jobs.”

“Renting, then. Cheaper down payment. I have some houses in town, but I think this may be more suitable. It’s a little remote and the house needs some repairs, but I think it would work.” He showed her the page. The house was two stories and had a nice front porch and a chimney. A wood burning stove would be nice if it worked. The gray paint on the outside was peeling a little, but it looked alright. The property was big and included a barn, albeit a rather run down one.

“Can we take a look at it?”

“This afternoon. I’ll show it to you.”

***

The first thing Henry did when he saw the house was run upstairs to claim his bedroom. Regina was more concerned with the practicals, if the house had hot water, if the appliances worked, and other such boring things. A part of her wished she could just run upstairs and fight over who gets the best room, but she somehow found herself responsible for a ten year old, a young lesbian couple, a hound dog, and a horse. After years of just looking out for herself, it was an odd change.

Mulan and Aurora were outside, looking at the barn and the pasture, and they seemed satisfied when they came back inside. Well, at least the barn was passable. Regina went around the house, testing all the faucets and light switches. There was definitely some work to be done, but luckily it seemed all superficial, mostly painting and repairing the staircase railing.

“What do you think, bud?” she asked Henry when he came back downstairs. 

“I love it. My room is huge!”

“You heard him. We’ll take it,” she said to Gold.

***

They spent the first night in the house camped out on the living room. Most of their money had gone into the deposit, the first month’s rent and a big bale of hay for Connie, which meant furniture would have to wait until they got jobs and collected a paycheck. The previous renters had left a stack of wood in the barn, so at least they had a nice fire. Henry pulled out his book of fairy tales and began to read, wrapped up tight in a sleeping bag. Hank was stretched out with his head next to Henry’s, snoring away by the fire. Mulan and Aurora were fast asleep, as well, though neither of them snored.

Regina took a deep breath and let it out.

_ Home, sweet home _ , she thought. She hadn’t stayed in one place longer than a week since Mal was first teaching her how to take care of herself as a vampire. It was a strange feeling, but she had to admit, she didn’t hate it.

***

Emma and Graham passed through Boston on their way to Storybrooke County, as the oracle had suggested. There, they found a livid fairy queen and her petulant son, both absolutely fuming about some escaped convict. They demanded that Emma and Graham hunt down the criminal and bring her back to justice.

“Petty theft isn’t really our department,” said Graham. Attempted burglary seemed to be the so-called criminal’s only crime, but the fairies were quite stirred up about the whole matter.

As for the B.C.C. agents, they were much more interested in the lampad nymph who had been torn up by something. Her heart was missing and there were bite marks on her throat and wrists. Lampades were no pushovers, so whatever had killed her must have been strong.

“Vampire?” suggested Emma, looking at the bite marks.

“The teeth pattern doesn’t match the Class A or B types we usually see. They have elongated upper canines, but their other teeth aren’t used for piercing. This one has a mouthful of sharp teeth.”

“Different kind of vampire, then, maybe Class G. Do you think it’s our girl?” Emma looked at the oracle’s drawing of the killer and tried to picture her with fangs. 

“Might be. Better be careful then. Class G vampires don’t have the same weaknesses as the others. Daylight doesn’t hurt them, silver and garlic do nothing. A stake through the heart would probably hurt like hell, but wouldn’t kill them instantly.”

“How do we stop her then?”

“Tranqs should work. If not, a beheading will kill almost anything.”

“Let’s go get her, then,” said Emma. She took one last look at the oracle’s drawing before folding it back up and putting it in her pocket.


	7. Into the Woods

_Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers...but it's smarter than you._

Margaret Atwood, _The Year of the Flood_

***

New Erland was not exactly the most active and bustling of towns, but Regina, Mulan, and Aurora did all manage to find jobs within two weeks of moving in - not the best jobs in the world, but they couldn’t afford to be picky. Regina had been hired as a bartender at a place called the Rabbit Hole. It was on the sleazy side, but the other bartenders said they made good tips and Regina knew she could handle herself against any unwieldy patrons. Mulan got a apprenticeship with a carpenter named Marco Geppetti, which payed terribly but meant that she could learn how to do repairs on the house. And Aurora found work at one of the fish markets at the docks. She might not be able to return to the sea, but at least she could be near it and have fresh fish every morning.

They were still deciding whether or not to enroll Henry at New Erland Elementary School, which meant he had the house to himself most mornings. Regina was technically there, but she always slept in late after working at the bar. One such morning Henry rose early to continue his exploration of the fields and forests that surrounded the house. Hank wagged his tail in anticipation and bounded out into the snow as soon as Henry opened the door. Henry went to get Connie from barn, so she could get some exercise. He wasn’t sure if horses needed to be walked the way dogs did, but he assumed so. Mulan and Regina had promised that they would teach him to ride her, but until then he just walked beside her with the lead rope.

There weren’t many other houses around them, though he did spot one across a shallow valley to the west and a few others scattered to the south. Occasional he saw smoke rising up from the houses that were hidden behind hills in the distance. The best mornings, though, were the ones when he spotted the spirits of the forest. He only got a glimpse when he did manage to see them, but it was nonetheless thrilling. So far he had seen a spectral raccoon that had somehow managed to steal Hank’s collar, a woman who stood about three feet tall and seemed to made of moss and leaves, and a little old man with a wild beard who disappeared into a birch tree. He hoped that if he visited often enough and brought the right offerings then maybe they would talk to him. Aurora suggested that he bring them milk, because that is what the leprechauns in Ireland liked to drink. He didn’t know if these spirits were Irish, though. They could be Abenaki or Penobscot if they were native to this area, but really they could be from anywhere. He had brought them milk before, so today he was going to try snickers bars.

First, he went to the birch tree where he had seen the little man with the long beard and placed an unwrapped snickers bar on the ground at the base of the tree. Hank had tried to eat it instantly, but Henry pulled the dog away. They went to sit on a fallen log to wait for the spirit. Just when Henry had thought he had waited as long as a person could wait, a wrinkled little hand came out from behind the tree, grabbed the candy bar, and then disappeared again. Henry grinned. Snickers were turning out to be a success.

They went to try the spots where he had seen the raccoon and the leaf woman, but they didn’t have any luck at either site. However, when they were passing through the part of the woods where he had seen the ghostly raccoon, the snickers that Henry was saving for himself did manage to go missing. Still he was satisfied that the morning venture had been a success, so he headed home, excited to try again tomorrow.

***

Emma Swan was at a loss for what to do. The oracle had gotten them as far as Storybrooke County, but she couldn’t see any specifics. Storybrooke was a haven for cryptid life and was protected by so many spells and enchantments that the oracle could see almost nothing inside its border. Not to mention the high population of sasquatches, the aniwye, and the herds of bonnacon pretty much masked all other smells. It was an almost impossible place for tracking. So Emma and Graham had done the leg work, going from town to town, informing the local police and showing the pictures of Henry and the vampire to see if anyone had seen them. No one had been particularly forthcoming. It had been nearly two weeks and they had nothing to show for it. The Bureau was ready to pull them off the case, let the local police handle it and contact them if anything turned up, but Emma wasn’t ready to let it go.

“There are other cases that could use your attention, Emma,” said Mary Margaret, after Emma had called her to ask for one more week to investigate. Emma could hear the sound of shuffling papers on the phone before Mary Margaret continued, “I’ve got a feral unicorn in upstate New York, a kamaitachi in California that has already skinned two people, and a witch that poisoned her husband with manticore venom.”

“I can’t just give up on this kid. He could still be alive, and he’s being held hostage by one of the most vicious vampires I’ve ever seen.” Emma ran her hands through her hair as she spoke, getting frustrated.

“I know it’s hard, but there are other missing children out there. We have to use our resources efficiently. We can’t put everything into this one child.”

“I understand that,” Emma said. And the logical part of herself did, but a deeper primal part wanted to rip through the county to find this kid.

Mary Margaret sighed. “Listen, Emma, there may be something we can do. The Bureau’s presence in Storybrooke has been, well, lacking in recent years. We’ve turned a blind eye to Storybrooke in the past, but it might be time for us to get more involved.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I think the county sheriff is going to retire soon, which means there will be a job opening,” said Mary Margaret.

“Don’t sheriffs have to be elected?”

“You will be.”

***

Henry went back every morning to the tall birch tree, leaving a chocolate bar at the base of the tree each time. He started with just snickers, but then tested out a few different varieties, to see which the forest spirit liked the most. He tried reese’s, three musketeers, and twix, but it didn’t seem to matter too much. The spirit liked anything with chocolate, though he rejected any hard candies. Sometimes only his hand came out to grab the treat, but more and more he was beginning to peer his face out, as well. It was just as wrinkled as his hand and half hidden behind the tangles of his brown beard, but it was a good-natured face.

Then one morning, the spirit spoke.

“Thank you, lad,” he said, looking out from behind the tree. His accent reminded Henry of Aurora’s, but it was even harder for Henry to understand.

“You’re welcome, um, sir,” said Henry.

“Could you call your beast back?” The spirit gestured to Hank, who was sniffing a little too close to the tree.

Henry whistled and the dog ran to his side. “Hank isn’t a beast. He’s a dog.”

The spirit stepped out from behind the tree. He was only a little bit bigger than those garden gnomes that people put in their front yards and his beard was long enough to touch the ground.

“When you’re my size, every dog is a beast, and don’t even get me started on that thing,” said the spirit, pointing to Connie. She snorted and shook her head.

“That’s Connie. She’s our horse.”

“Yours and the dog’s?”

“No, my, um, family’s horse.”

“Big family?” asked the spirit, putting his hands on his hips.

“There’s four of us, plus the dog and the horse. What about yours?” Henry went to sit on the fallen log, keeping a hold of Connie and Hank, so they didn’t scare the spirit.

“No, no, it’s just me. Most of my kind are back in the old country. Good old Scotland. But I’ve ended up here, so here I’ll stay.”

“How’d you get here?”

“I came over with the tree, back when it was no more than a wee seed. It’s imported, you see. A silver birch. We look after them.”

“Who’s we?” asked Henry.

“The Ghillie Dhu, guardians of the silver birch. And I’m Alistair.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Henry.”

“Good to meet you, then, Henry. You’ve been causing quite a stir with the forest folk. Keep feeding us this way and we’ll all be as wide as we are tall.”

“You know the others?” Henry said. He tapped his feet a bit in excitement.

“Ah, sure, sure, good lasses. Want to meet them?”

Henry couldn’t nod quickly enough.

“Alright, I’ll be back soon, old girl,” Alistair said, giving the tree a pat. Then he asked, “Can I take a ride on your beast?” Henry agreed, so Alistair tucked his beard around his neck like a scarf and climbed up on Hank’s back. Hank looked a little confused, turning his head around to get a better look at what was on his back. Henry managed to settle him down, though.

“Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you supposed to ride those things?” asked Alistair when Henry didn’t climb onto Connie.

“I don’t know how yet.”

“Well, do your best to keep up, then,” said Alistair. He nudged Hank with his heels and the dog trotted away into the forest, leaving Henry to jog along behind. They moved farther away from the houses and into a more secluded part of the woods where the trees were darker and the brush more thick. Alistair eventually reached the spot he was looking for and gave a short sharp whistle. The spectral raccoon revealed herself first, climbing down from one of the trees and sitting back on her haunches to look at them. Leaf lady, as it turned out, was already there, just hidden. She blended in so well to the bark of a tree that Henry didn’t notice her until she stepped away from it.

“Come on now. The lad’s alright,” said Alistair. They came a little closer. The raccoon sniffed at Henry’s jacket and then wrinkled her nose as if she didn’t quite like the smell.

“Right well, Henry, I’d like to introduce Ivy and Toaket. Toa here is local, been here for centuries, but Ivy’s a new arrival like me,” Alistair said.

“Nice to meet you, Henry,” said Ivy, the leaf woman. It was hard to tell how old she was, but her voice sounded young and airy.

Toaket chittered something that Ivy and Alistair must have understood. She turned and scrambled up a tree, only to return a few moments later with Duke’s collar. Regina had already bought him a new one, but it was a nice gesture either way. Henry went ahead and put it on Duke, right next to the other one.

“She says sorry for taking it. She likes it when you bring her chocolate,” said Ivy.

“Oh, here you go,” said Henry, taking a reese’s from his pocket. Toaket took it from his hand and made quick work of scarfing it down. She made a happy noise and began cleaning off her paws. Henry had kind of hoped that when she ate the treat, it would be like when ghosts eat things in cartoons and you can see the food going down. No such luck, though. She was translucent, but nothing inside of her was visible.

Ivy, meanwhile, took an immediate liking to Connie. She could walk right under the mare without her head even touching Connie’s belly, which she did several times back and forth. Ivy pressed her hands together and shut her eyes tight, concentrating hard. When she opened her hands again, there was a plump apple in them, which she offered to the horse.

Henry had a thousand questions for them, about what they were and where they came from, and he was able to get through some of them. He also had a great deal to share about his own life, telling them all about Regina, Mulan, and Aurora. Alistair was delighted to hear that Aurora was a selkie.

“Ah, selkies. They’ll steal your wits and they’ll steal your heart,” he said, nudging Henry a little with his tiny elbow.

“Actually, it’s Regina who steals hearts. She’s a vampire and she needs them to eat,” said Henry. Ivy gasped and ducked behind a tree.

“Oh, you don’t even have a heart, Ivy. You’re made of plants. And she’s not even here,” said Alistair. Toaket made a noise that sounded like the raccoon version of laughing, and Ivy poked her head out, but still didn’t come out.

Eventually, though, Henry realized that it must be getting quite late and he really should get home. He said goodbye to Toaket and Ivy and gave Alistair a ride back to his tree, before running back to the house. He ran straight upstairs to grab his sketchbook and record his new friends.

“What’s that you’re drawing?” Regina asked when she finally woke up.

“Her name is Toaket. She’s a raccoon spirit. She stole Hank’s collar, but she gave it back.” He pointed to the two collars around Hank’s neck.

“Sure, sure. Just don’t go into those woods alone at night. Raccoon spirits are one thing, but there could be more dangerous things there, too.”

“Ok, I promise,” said Henry. He turned back to his drawing, determined to get the shading on the tail just right.

***

The sheriff’s station was in one of the coastal towns of Storybrooke County, a place called New Erland. Emma was surprised it wasn’t more centrally located, but she couldn’t complain about having the beach so close. The town itself was pretty small and quiet. Fishing was the main industry, and the docks were the only part of town that could be considered lively. Too bad Emma hated seafood.

Graham had left just before Emma was elected sheriff. He was assigned a new partner and went off to deal with the witch who killed her husband. Neither Graham nor Emma were particularly sentimental, so their goodbye had been quick, but Emma had to admit that she would miss him as a partner. He had taught her a lot and he’d always had her back. She wasn’t sure she could say the same about her new deputy, a young man name Phillip, with two ‘l’s. He had been very specific about that. The former, now retired sheriff had had two deputies, Phillip and Frederick, but Frederick had left with the old sheriff. Phillip had stuck around. He seemed nice enough, but a little naive. And he was human, which could be a liability. There was also a secretary, a young pregnant woman named Ashley, who was in the B.C.C.’s records as a telepath. She had gotten into a bit of trouble a few years earlier, for stealing and selling congressional secrets, but she had completed her rehabilitation with the Bureau and relocated to Storybrooke.

Ashley was the one who gave Emma the grand tour of the sheriff station, all one room of it. There were four desks, for Emma, Ashley, Phillip, and an empty one, as well as two holding cells and a coffee station. Ashley told her that there was a basement, too, with the heavier duty holding cells, but it was rarely used.

“Oh, and your badge and gun are in your desk. You just have to fill the paperwork,” said Ashley.

 _Great_ , thought Emma, _more paperwork_.

Emma sat down at the desk and got to work, but it was more than a relief when Ashley’s phone rang. She had a brief conversation, writing on a notepad as she listened, and then hung up.

“We’ve got a robbery at the grocery store. Two kids, one distracted the clerk and the other took the money out of the register,” she said.

“Want me to take this one, boss?” Phillip asked.

“No, I’ll get it.” Emma jumped up, perhaps a little too eagerly.

In the end, it was a pretty easy case. The grocery store, like most stores, had cameras that captured the whole robbery, and because it was a small town, it didn’t take long to identify the kids. They were fourteen, so Emma didn’t come down too hard on them. She just made them return the money and gave them a warning about stealing again. She’d let the parents deal with the discipline, and, based off their expressions, they would.

On her way back to the station she ran into her temporary landlord, a man who seemed to be the whole town’s landlord.

“Ah, Ms. Swan. How are you settling in?” Mr. Gold asked.

“Just fine,” she said.

“Glad to hear it. Have a good day, now.”

Mr. Gold was a polite enough man, but there was something about him that made her skin crawl. She was sure he was inhuman, but the Bureau had no records on him. Perhaps he was just a scheming robber baron of a human. His rent prices were ridiculous. Emma couldn’t wait to buy her own place instead renting the small loft apartment from him. If Graham were here, he would probably tell Emma to play nice. Gold obviously knew a lot about the goings on in the town, but Emma had the feeling that he wouldn’t give up information without a price.

***

Regina wanted to yank that damn bell off of the door of the pawn shop. Something about its high-pitched ringing sound just grated at her. Plus, everytime it rang was followed by an interaction with Gold, and that was never enjoyable. It was like she was being conditioned, Pavlov style, to hate it.

“What can I help you with, dearie?” Mr. Gold asked, standing in his usual spot behind the counter.

Regina went up to the counter, clenching and unclenching her hands a bit in discomfort. She didn’t want to ask for his help, but he was the only person who might be able to help her.

“I wanted to ask you something,” she said, and then paused, unsure of how to continue.

“Are you working up to it?” He smirked at her.

“How do cryptids with certain, um, dietary requirements, you know, find food?”

“What body part are you interested in?” he asked without missing a beat.

“Heart and blood.”

He chuckled a little, and then said, “Go to the hospital and ask for Dr. Whale. He’ll help you out. Oh, and I’d bring cash if I were you.”

“Thank you,” she said, attempting a genuine smile.

The hospital, like most things in the town, was only a few blocks away from the main street. It was larger than she expected, a big brick building with tall white columns in the front. At that size, it must be the main county hospital, and not just the one for New Erland. She found a nurse inside and asked for Whale.

“He should be downstairs in the morgue,” he said.

For all the New England charm of the outer building and the upstairs, the basement was creepy as hell. It was all concrete and flickering light bulbs. She could smell the death and formaldehyde before she even opened the door of the morgue. Inside were several examination tables, two of which were occupied with bodies. The back wall was taken up by silver mortuary racks, and there was a sink and cabinets for tools on the opposite wall. A man in a white lab coat was working on one of the bodies, a middle aged man with his chest cut open.

“Can I help you?” the man asked when Regina entered. He looked like he was in his thirties, but his hair was bright white.

“I was told you were the person to talk to about getting some hearts,” she said.

“You would be right about that. I’m Victor Whale. I’d shake your hand, but, well-” He held up his bloody gloved hands and shrugged.

“Regina.”

“So, hearts, huh? Well, you’re welcome to this one, but it is completely clogged with plaque.”

“I’m fine for now. But I’ll need one soon, in like a week or so. And blood.”

Whale stood and took off his lab gloves. He went over to one of the cabinets and pulled out a binder. “Let me show you our payment plans. We have a variety of options based on quality of the organ, rarity of the blood type, age of the donor when they died, local or imported.”

Regina read over the options, wincing a little at the prices. It was probably worth it, though, if it meant she didn’t have to kill people. She wasn’t too picky about blood type, but she did like her hearts to be pretty fresh, and that cost extra. It was a bit like ordering a build-your-own pizza, really.

Whale had left a half eaten burrito on the counter, but he picked it up and started finishing it off as she made her selections. It was a little hard to tell over the smell of formaldehyde, but the meat in the burrito was definitely something strange.

“Is that-?” she started to ask.

“Brains, yep. Good source of omega-3s. And, you know, I’m a zombie,” he said with a grin.

 _Well, that explained the white hair and pale skin_ , she thought.

“All done?” he asked. She nodded and passed him the binder and her order form.

Whale looked it over for a moment and then said, “Alright, delivery will be in two weeks. Pleasure doing business with you, Regina.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, Dr. Whale and Blaine from izombie kind of merged together.


	8. What the Water Gave Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We finally find out what Emma is in this chapter. And some other stuff happens...  
> Also, thanks for all the lovely comments! I really appreciate them.

_And every inch of the ocean is haunted. There are ghost fish swimming all around me. My hands pass right through their flat bodies. Phantom crabs shake their phantom claws at me from behind a sunken anchor. Octopuses cartwheel by, leaving an effulgent red trail. A school of minnows swims right through my belly button. Dead, I think. They are all dead._

Karen Russell, “Haunting Olivia”

***

The sound of the knife punching through the thick sheet of ice was not far from the sound of cracking bones, however when it echoed out over the frozen lake, it became even more eerie. On the other side of the lake, a lone doe raised her head, watching for a moment before bolting back into the deep cover of the woods. To the three men, however, that sound meant the unique pleasure and peace of a day spent ice fishing. The oldest of the three cut the nearly perfect circle while the others set up the chairs and the coolers of beer around him. This was perhaps the last weekend they would get a chance to do this. In the southern parts of the country, it was already spring, but here in Maine the ice was still thick enough to stand on. The state officials may recommend otherwise, but they were too cautious, and the fishermen had been doing this for years. They knew which ice was safe and which to avoid.

Eddie Caron, the youngest of the three by about nineteen years, began to sing that damn song from the Disney movie about ice. His daughter was six and had been demanding to listen to the album for weeks straight. He and his wife were hardly able to get her into the car before she began screaming for “Let it Go.” The other two shouted at him to shut it, but they laughed, too, in the high spirits of those married men who complain constantly of their wives, the old ball-and-chain kind of spiel, and then finally get away to fart and drink beer with other men in the forest.

“And done,” declared Tom Reynolds proudly, throwing his arms out like Vanna White to show off the hole he had cut in the ice.

“It’s a true beauty,” agreed Eddie.

“Let’s hope the fish agree,” said the third man, Will Erikson, who had already flopped himself into one of the chairs, beer in hand and fishing pole laying on the ice by his feet.

“They will, my boy. They will,” said Tom.

The fish did seem to be impressed enough by the hole, or at least by the tasty bait that was dangling on the hooks. They were biting well and Eddie caught one before he even finished his first beer. He sat back, listening to Tom and Will having their same old argument about who was the best coach for the Mariners. Eddie secretly agreed with Will, but he liked Tom better in general, so he kept his mouth shut.

“Alright, alright, I gotta take a leak,” said Eddie, setting down his beer and walking off the ice. He could hear Tom and Will’s voices laughing behind him as he headed back to the shore next to the spot where they parked their car. He stepped behind a cluster of trees, just out of sight, and relieved himself, writing his name sloppily in the snow. He wished he was more relaxed about doing the deed, but he was one of those guys who always used a private stall in the men’s restroom, rather than the side to side urinals. He always managed to veil his shyness in homophobic bravado, however, which seemed to work.

Zipping back up, Eddie came back around the trees, looking across the ice toward Tom and Will, only to find the site empty. He scanned the lake, frowning, but the two men were out of sight, leaving behind only an empty chair and their pile of fishing gear. For a second, Eddie thought they were playing a joke on him, but there were few hiding places on a barren lake. His stomach plunged as he realized the ice must have been thinner than they thought. Forgetting all reason, Eddie ran out back toward them, praying they were still close enough to the surface to pull out. The fishing hole that Tom had cut so perfectly had cracked and widened, forming a jagged break in the ice. As he grew closer, Eddie slipped onto his stomach and shimmied up to edge.

“Tom! Will!” he shouted, plunging his hand into the icy water and feeling around desperately for his friends. They had done this so many times, Tom for nearly forty years, and nothing like this had ever happened. Eddie thought they had been so careful. The feeling was leaving his fingers as he grasped at empty water. Then his hand closed around something solid, a wrist. Eddie pulled as best he could at his awkward angle, so that the meaty hand of Will emerged from under the water. Eddie didn’t know how he was going to pull up Will’s entire body and he reached in with his other hand, trying to get a better grip on the other man’s torso, but with no luck. Repositioning his weight, Eddie gave a tremendous yank and pulled the arm out of the water, doing so with more ease than he expected. It weighed considerably less than it should have, because there was no body attached. Will’s water-logged arm hung severed just above elbow, dangling limp and cold in Eddie’s grasp.

Eddie dropped it and screamed loud enough to scare up a flock of geese, who flew away, honking. He pushed himself back away from the hole and scrambled to his feet. He slipped twice before he finally made it up. Then he ran, faster than he should have on the slick ice. His gaze was focused on the car, still peacefully parked beside the lake, but if he had paused to look down and behind him, he would have seen a dark shape in the water, formless through the thick ice but undoubtedly large, moving swiftly and smoothly toward him. As such, he saw no such thing, but only heard a cracking sound under his feet as the ice broke and he was pulled under into the frigid water.

After a few minutes of silence, the geese eventually returned, settling into the newly formed holes in the ice, where they could hunt for fish in the quiet morning.

***

Aurora took the first herring out of the cooler and placed it on her table. In seal form, she used to just sink her teeth right into the fish, eating them scales, bones, and all, but she couldn’t quite stomach such things now. Besides, this wasn’t even really her fish to eat, just hers to prepare for the market. Her boss liked to offer both fresh and fried fish for the customers. She picked up her paring knife and began scraping the scales off of the dead fish. Two of the fisherman from the boss’ boat came up to her stall then, carrying a barrel of fish between them.

“Got another load for you, Rory,” said one, a man named Eric. He was a little gruff at times, but not a bad sort. The gossip on the dock was that his girlfriend had recently left him, so a little gruffness was to be expected.

“Great, thanks. You can set them by the others,” she said.

“Have you heard the news?” asked the other fisherman. He was a stout, round-faced man named William Smee, who always wore the same red beanie. He was notorious for his loose lips, so they were all careful not to share anything too private with him. Today, though, his tone was much more serious than usual.

“No, what’s happened?” she asked.

“Three dockworkers disappeared on an ice fishing trip on Lake Nostos. They were supposed to come back to work today. Their boss thinks they just got drunk and didn’t show up, but I knew those guys. They liked a drink, but never on the job,” said Eric, looking grim.

“I tell you, there’s something coming after us. Something in the water.” Smee glared out at the ocean waves, more dramatically than was necessary.

“Lake Nostos is freshwater,” said Eric.

“It lets out into the ocean, doesn’t it?” Smee argued back.

Aurora finished de-scaling and gutting the fish and chopped off its head with a meat cleaver. Smee flinched a little at the sound.

“You’d better be careful out there, then,” she said.

She set the meat for frying into one pile and the guts and heads in another, to be used as lobster bait later, and pulled another herring from the cooler.

The morning passed quickly. Cleaning and cooking fish was a fairly mindless job, so Aurora was free to daydream while she worked, usually about how much she missed being in the ocean. Sometimes she thought of her childhood, swimming with her mother under the Cliffs of Moher, chasing schools of fat fish and then coming up on rare sunny days to lie out on the rocks. Other times she thought of Mulan, the life they had together in Boston and the life they could hopefully build in Storybrooke. Today, though, her thoughts were on the missing fishermen and on monsters of the land and sea.

There was a commotion on the docks that snapped Aurora out of her reverie. There were screams and several of the workers began running toward one of the fishing boats that had just returned from the sea. Aurora jumped up and followed them. There was a crowd surrounding the boat and she had to push her way through to see what everyone was looking at.

“We pulled him up in the net,” said one of the fishermen. He was shaking fiercely and looked like he might be in shock. At his feet, laid out on the dock, was the body of what had once been a man. It was bloated from being in the water for so long and covered with small round bite marks, making it almost unrecognizable. Eric seemed to recognize who it was, though.

“It’s Eddie. Something’s eaten him,” he said, looking like he might throw up.

***

“Sheriff, one of those missing fishermen has turned up,” said Ashley.

“From your tone of voice I’m guessing he didn’t wander home after an all nighter,” said Emma.

“One of the fishing boats pulled him out of the water. He’d been dead for a few hours. They said there were marks all over him, like the fish had been eating him.”

Emma grimaced a little at the thought of that. She’d probably seen worse, but it was never pleasant to see a drowned and chewed up body.

“Right, can you call the medical examiner and have him meet us there? Phillip, let’s go.”

Phillip jumped up, banging his knee on the desk as he did so, but he recovered quickly. Emma rolled her eyes at him, but in a way she was glad to not work this case solo.

When they arrived at the docks, Emma had Phillip work on crowd control, moving people away from the body and clearing a path for the medical examiner to get through. Emma talked to the fishing crew who had pulled the man from the water, taking notes on everything they remembered. Nothing they said was particularly helpful for the case. They had set out early in the morning, before sunrise, and caught one good catch before pulling up the net with Eddie Caron inside of it. She told them they could go and went over to look at the body herself. The holes in the the flesh were all smaller than four inches in diameter, and jagged. They had been ripped or bitten, clearly not a clean cut in any of them.

“Well, that’s pretty nasty,” said a voice.

Emma looked up to see a pale man with a hint of a smirk on his face standing over her.

“You must be Dr. Whale,” she said.

“I must be.” He bent down next to her and shined a little flashlight in one of the bite holes.

“Have you seen anything like this before?”

“Can’t say that I have. I’ll need to get it back to the morgue, though, just to be sure.” He used a gloved hand to touch the torn flesh and then brought his fingers to his nose to smell it.

“Sure, just let Phillip get some pictures first before we move the body. And, of course, your full report will need to be sent to the B.C.C. Don’t sell any of his body parts until the case is closed.”

Whale looked startled by that, the former hint of arrogance gone from his expression.

“What? Did you think I didn’t know about your little racket? The Bureau has records on you from your time in Seattle. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume you’d be doing the same here. I don’t mind it really. I’d rather have all our zombies and vampires well fed, but remember the investigation comes first,” she said, standing back up.

Whale just nodded.

“And speaking of vampires, have you had one recently as a new client? She would have ordered hearts as well as blood.”

“I’m afraid I have not,” he said, regaining a little of his composure.

“She’s probably feeding on her own, then. Well, I’d better get Phillip.” Emma went over to find Phillip talking to a young woman with auburn hair and a sweet face. He was acting oddly flustered around her and Emma thought she could see a genuine blush on his cheeks. It turned out Phillip was not so smooth with the ladies.

“Phillip, I need you to photograph the body,” Emma said.

“Yes, r-right away, Sheriff,” he said. He walked over toward Whale and the body, looking back at the young woman so often that he almost ran into a table of fish. Emma turned to ask her if she had seen anything, but then a strange warm feeling came over her when she really looked closely at her. Rather than lovestruck, it made her suspicious.

“I’d better head home then, Sheriff,” the woman said, turning to leave.

“What was your name again?” Emma asked.

“Aurora McNamara, I know it’s a mouthful. You can call me Rory.” She definitely seemed nervous now, but before Emma could question her further, she had hurried away off the docks. Emma sighed and went back to the mutilated corpse.

***

Aurora returned home early from work, bringing news of the dead man who was pulled from the water. Mulan had the day off and Regina was sleeping upstairs, but Henry quickly ran up to wake her.

“What’s this about?” she asked as Henry pulled her down the stairs.

Aurora told her all about the body and the strange markings that covered it.

“It was probably just fish, Henry. They do that to bodies that drown sometimes,” said Regina with a yawn.

“No, I don’t think so. There was something, if you’ll forgive the pun, fishy about it,” said Aurora.

Mulan gave a little smile at that. She didn’t smile very often, but Aurora brought them out of her. Regina was less amused. She was hoping things would calm down when they reached Storybrooke, and that maybe she could just volunteer at an animal shelter to atone for everything she had done. Based on Henry’s expression, though, it seemed like she would soon be investigating a murder.

“I’m sure the sheriff’s office can handle it. I heard they just elected a new one,” Regina said.

Henry just shook his head.

“Henry, I don’t know the first thing about detective work or sea monsters,” she said.

“I do,” said Aurora, “about sea monsters, not the detective thing. And I have a suspicion about what we might be dealing with.”

Regina didn’t like the way Aurora said “we” as if they were all going to go fight a sea monster.

“I’ve never actually seen one before, but my mom used to warn me about wandering away on my own. She said if I did I might get eaten by one of the great water serpents,” said Aurora

“Water serpents,” repeated Regina. Despite living in coastal Louisiana for a few years, she had never heard of them, but then again, Mallory and Rose had never been much for going to the beach.

“They can live all over the world and there are a bunch of different varieties. Some have horns, venomous fangs, special powers, but they have a lot in common, too. They can walk on land in human form, looking just like any other person. But in the water, they have a long snake’s tail instead of legs, kind of like a mermaid, but more vicious.”

“That sounds a bit like Madam White Snake,” said Mulan. At their blank faces, she added, “Madam White Snake was a snake spirit who could cause floods, until a jealous terrapin spirit imprisoned her in a pagoda. Her sister Madam Green Snake is still around, I think.”

“Maybe we could ask her for help,” suggested Henry.

“She’s in China, bit far to travel,” said Mulan.

“Why do you think think the thing that killed the fishermen is a water serpent?” asked Regina.

Aurora took a moment to answer, as if trying to find the right words. “It’s sort of a gut feeling. I mean, there are a lot of water monsters out there, but there’s a vague memory I have. The little bite marks all over looked familiar. Water serpents have human faces, so their mouths are quite small.”

Henry looked up at Regina expectantly.

“How do we stop them?” she asked.

“They’re afraid of birds, the bigger, the better. A roc or a thunderbird would be perfect,” said Aurora.

“Oh, I can give that serpent a bird,” said Regina, flashing a smile at Henry. He looked delighted and instantly began making plans to stake out the docks. There would be diagrams, walkie talkies, and harpoons from the sound of it.

***

The Bureau had received the photographs and medical report of the body of Eddie Caron, and had called Emma not long after with an identification. Belle had called Emma personally to report it.

“It looks like a water serpent, class E. They’re pretty nasty, not to mention elusive,” said Belle.

“How do I track it down?”

“You don’t, not when it’s in human form. You’ll have to get it when it’s in the water. We’ll send you the whole species profile. Electricity and fire are usually effective against them. And it says they’re afraid of birds.”

“Thanks, Belle.”

“Oh, the director wants to speak to you,” she said. Emma could hear the phone being handed over.

“Emma, be careful with this one. Water serpents are nothing to underestimate. And your powers won’t work on it when it’s in the water,” said Mary Margaret.

“Ok, I will be.”

“Alright, now I have to go. I’m meeting with the idiot-in-chief this afternoon. God, I miss Oba-” The phone hung up before Snow had finished speaking, but Emma laughed anyway. Her laughter didn’t last long, though, as she turned her mind to the case. She opened her email to look at the water serpent profile. As she read through it, she started to form an idea. She looked over at Phillip, who was searching the computer for similar killings across the United States and Canada. He was not going to like this plan.

***

Phillip shifted uncomfortably in his new clothes. He looked more like a kid playing dress up than an actual fisherman, the way he kept fidgeting with his cap and shifting in his heavy boots. They had closed off the docks, so that none of the workers would get in the way, and he was alone on them. Emma stood further back, out of sight and out of smell range of Phillip. They had rubbed him down with raw fish earlier, just to make him extra convincing and extra tempting. Emma was holding an electric harpoon, the latest cutting-edge weaponry from the Bureau, which would hopefully just stun the water serpent. Still, if it did kill the thing, it would be an acceptable loss. It had killed at least three people after all.

The sun was down and high tide was coming in fast, throwing a cold mist over Phillip, who stuck his hands in his pockets and stomped his feet again. He looked over to where Emma was hiding, his expression making it obvious how much he did not want to be there.

Emma was about to suggest that they go find a little boat or something to go out on the water. Maybe they would have more luck that way. She was a little worried that the commotion of finding the body may have scared the serpent away. Just as she was thinking it, though, she caught a flash of something silvery and glistening breach the water, just for a moment. Phillip looked out over the water, but whatever it was had already ducked back down into the dark sea. Emma crept forward and crouched behind a shipping crate, as close as she dared to get without being seen by the serpent.

Phillip began tapping his foot on the dock, still looking out at the ocean. This time, when the scaled mound of the serpent’s tail rose from the water, he noticed it. His eyes went wide. It was so much closer than it had been when Emma had seen it the first time. Water serpents could move seriously fast. She raised her harpoon, aiming it at the ripples in the water made by the creature. She was tense, waiting for it to rise again, so she could shoot.

Something cold and wet wrapped around her foot. Emma looked down to see not a snake’s tail, but a long and suckered tentacle, rising out of the water from the opposite direction that they had seen the serpent. She didn’t even have time to curse before she was yanked off the slippery dock and into the icy waters of the Atlantic, losing her grip on the harpoon as she went down. She was pulled rapidly through the water, moving away from the beach and out toward the deeper ocean. In front of her swam what she could only describe as a squid monster mermaid. The front section of it looked similar to a human with brown skin and blonde hair. She was pretty actually, Emma thought, but it was the back half of the creature that was more interesting and dangerous. Instead of legs, long tentacles extended from the creature’s waist. Emma couldn’t count them while she was being pulled roughly through the water, but there were a lot of them, one of which had an uncomfortably tight hold on Emma’s ankle.

Another shape came swimming whiplike toward them, the water serpent. This one also had a human face and torso, though she was pale and red-haired. As she neared them, her mouth opened to reveal a row of jagged teeth.

Emma kicked and thrashed, but was unable to break free. The water serpent reached them and grabbed Emma’s arm with her webbed hands, pulling it toward herself as if she were going to bite it. Forgetting what Snow had told her, Emma reached out and tried to yank the soul out of the water serpent’s body, but she couldn’t do it. It was like trying a to force a couch through a keyhole. Frustrated, Emma elected for a good old fashioned punch to the serpent’s face. It seemed to work, momentarily at least, as the serpent flinched back and let go of Emma’s arm. Emma might not be able to pull the soul from the serpent, but perhaps the squid beast wouldn’t be so resistant. Emma bent forward and grabbed the tentacle that held her. She sensed the creature’s soul and seized it, pulling as hard as she could, and managed to rip it out. The creature stopped swimming, stopped moving at all. Her face no longer had an expression of fierce determination, or any expression at all. She was blank, frozen in place, with no desire or motivation driving her to move in the water.

Emma would have felt victorious, but her lungs were beginning to burn from lack of oxygen and her vision was blurring. What looked like a human figure swam toward her. Emma thought it must be the water serpent, but she didn’t think she had the energy to fight it. She prepared herself to feel the sharp teeth of the serpent. Instead the figure pulled Emma upward, swimming with her until they broke through the surface. Emma coughed and gasped. The figure who had rescued her didn’t stay long. Before Emma could get a good look at the person, they dove back down into the sea, leaving Emma to tread water on the surface.

Curiosity got the better of her, so even though she was still breathing hard, she ducked her head underwater to look for the rescuer. Instead of the human figure, she saw what was perhaps one of the strangest sights she’d ever seen. It appeared to be an underwater battle between a large black bird and the water serpent. The water serpent was bleeding from her shoulder and trying to dislodge the bird from the grip it had on her back, emitting a horrible shrieking sound as she did so.

Emma felt her vision start to fade again, so she brought her head back up to breathe. She took a few deep gulps of air, impatient to get an update on the fight. Before she could look again, though, a woman with black hair burst up through the surface beside her. Emma looked at her and felt like her brain was going to short out. There were three things that she needed to process, three strange and impossible things. First, the woman who had saved her was none other than Regina, the arsonist killer from Wyoming. Second, she was so much prettier in real life than in the oracle’s drawing. And finally, she was apparently a swimming bird, as well as a vampire.

“Are you ok?” asked Regina.

Emma managed to choke out a yes and then Regina was helping her swim back to the shore. The sea monsters had been fast swimmers, and they were further out than Emma had expected. It took the two of them several minutes to swim back, and would have taken longer if not for the incoming tide pushing them along. Eventually they managed to crawl up onto the beach, both panting and exhausted. Phillip came running toward them, his face looking white from fear.

“That was - I mean, you just - the fish,” he babbled. He saw Regina and his eyes got so wide they looked like they might pop out. “Y-you’re on our most wanted list,” he said.

Emma could have kicked him.

Regina jumped to her feet and leapt upwards, transforming into a black vulture as she did so. She flew away before Emma could even call after her. Phillip at least had the decency to look guilty. He started to apologize, but Emma waved it away. There was a small part of her that was glad the vampire had escaped. She honestly wasn’t sure what she would’ve done if the woman had stayed. Phillip helped Emma to her feet and they decided to head back to the station, satisfied that the sea monsters had been stopped.

***

The bodies washed up over the next week. The squid monster was found first, still alive, but immobilized and empty. Emma and Phillip had locked her in one of the basement holding cells to await for the Bureau to collect her and send her to one of their imprisonment facilities. In the meantime, Emma returned her soul and was able to question the woman a little about the murders. Her name was Ursula and she had once been an upstanding member of the cryptid community. She had been enrolled in one of the Bureau’s feeding programs, but like many cryptids, had found the options too limited and unsatisfying. Then she had met Ariel, the charismatic water serpent. Ariel was also sick of the feeding program and so the two of them had banded together to hunt fishermen. They had started by taking people from the remote lakes of Canada, before slowly working their way south, moving back and forth between fresh water and sea water in a failed attempt to keep the Bureau from catching them. Ursula admitted that they should have moved on from New Erland, but apparently the humans from the town tasted better than others.

“Am I ever going to see the ocean again?” Ursula asked, after she had told Emma her story.

“What’s your species lifespan?” asked Emma.

“About two hundred years.”

“There’s a chance, then,” said Emma. She turned to leave, but Ursula called for her to wait.

“One more question. That thing you did to me. What exactly are you?” Ursula asked.

Emma smiled a little sadly. “A valkyrie,” she said.

Ariel showed up a few days later, tossed up onto the beach like a ragdoll. She had not survived her encounter with the vampire. There was a deep gash across her throat and many more shallow cuts over her body from the vulture’s talons. The Bureau security team that was sent up to collect Ursula went ahead and took Ariel’s body, as well. Emma imagined they would dissect it and add some new information to the species profile of the class E water serpent.

“Case closed then, boss,” said Phillip, after they handed over Ursula and the body of Ariel.

Emma thought about the vampire killer who had inexplicably saved her from the water.

“Yeah, I suppose it is,” she said.


	9. Where the Devil Don't Go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An inside look at the Bureau of Cryptid Concealment

_Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,_

_Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other._

_Thirty years now I have labored_

_To dredge the silt from your throat._

_I am none the wiser._

Sylvia Plath, “The Colossus”

***

Belle was so focused on preparing a report on increasing sasquatch activity for the director that she did not immediately notice the man standing in the doorway and staring at her. When she finally did look up, he gave her what he surely thought was a charming smile and she rolled her eyes. He was a bit like a sasquatch himself, though she thought his manners were probably worse. He strutted over to her desk and sat down on it, nearly pushing her potted spider plant over the edge as he did so.

“Have a drink with me tonight?” he asked. Well, not really asked. It was really more of a statement.

Belle stood and picked up the spider plant from its precarious position. “I’m afraid not, Gaston,” she said.

Nicolás Gaston had been asking her out consistently since he had started working for the B.C.C. three months ago. She never accepted him, but that didn’t seem to deter him. He was a woodwose, a French cryptid that reminded Belle of the satyrs she used to have to deal with. She had to admit he made sense as a choice for the Bureau’s security team. After all, he was big, strong, and he didn’t have many ideas of his own. But he did have persistence.

“Come on. The director has to let you have a night off sometime,” he said.

“I have the night off. I just don’t want to go for a drink.”

“Oh, what are you going to do, then?”

She shifted the plant onto her hip. “Probably read a book.”

“That sounds boring. Oh, well. Next time then.” He stood and left the office, completely unruffled by her rejection. He’d be back again in a few days to ask again. He always was. She wondered if she should file a formal complaint, or have one of her vines simply choke him to death. She ran her hands over one of the wilted leaves of the spider plant and it instantly plumped up again. It was one of the benefits of being a nymph that she could have such beautiful plants even two stories underground. She set down the spider plant and looked over the others, fantasizing about which one would be the best murder weapon.

“Belle, can you run another assessment on Lucas?” Director White asked, coming out of her office and breaking Belle away from her daydream.

“Of course, Director,” said Belle.

***

Nic Gaston was in a pretty good mood as he did the rounds of the holding cells, making sure everyone was still in their cages. The B.C.C. Headquarters didn’t have an extensive prison facility, but it was one of the primary centers for the rehabilitation of cryptids. As such, they didn’t get many of the truly nasty cases, just the “misguided” individuals, as the director called them. Gaston didn’t care much either way. They were all criminals to him.

He passed by the werewolf’s cage to find her lying on her cot and staring up at the ceiling. She had taken it pretty hard finding out what she was and what she had done. Brooding and not talking were the main things she did these days. Pretty sorry excuse for a werewolf in his opinion.

In the cell next to the werewolf was a cranky bog witch who always hissed and shouted at him in Russian or something whenever he passed by. He took out his taser rod, basically a modified cattle prod and whacked the bars of her cage to get her to shut up.

Then there was Leroy, the angriest dwarf in the world.

“Hey, pretty boy, why don’t you come a little closer, so I can shove that taser down your throat,” said Leroy.

Gaston was tempted to taze the dwarf right then and there, but the director didn’t like her guards to use excessive force. It was bad for PR or something like that, which didn’t make sense to Gaston, because they were a covert organization. But he did what the director wanted.

“You know, Leroy, I’ve got a spider demon, a vampire, and an aswang in here, and yet, somehow, you manage to be the most unpleasant.”

“You can kiss my ass-wang,” said Leroy.

“Just stay in your cage,” Gaston said, continuing on down the line of cells.

***

Dr. Henry Jekyll pierced his knife into the specimen and began to saw through the scales to reach the muscle tissue beneath. It wasn’t everyday that he got a chance to dissect a relatively fresh specimen of a water serpent. They were an incredibly resilient species, very difficult to kill. Usually the ones that the Bureau was able to attain had been dead for weeks and washed ashore, so that there was little left of them other than the skeleton. This one had been young when she died, which may have explained how Agent Swan was able to kill her. Not that he doubted the agent’s abilities, but water serpents were one of the few species that could resist a valkyrie. They were resistant to most types of magic. Jekyll had a few theories as to why that was and he was excited to test them out. He had already taken samples of the water serpent’s external tissue - her hair, skin, and scales - but now he was excited to see what was inside. He had to operate on the specimen in a water tank to keep her in serpent form, which didn’t make for ideal surgical conditions, but he would persevere. She was worth it.

***

Belle sat down on the floor in front of Ruby Lucas’ cell with her tablet on her lap. Usually the Bureau’s psychologist, Dr. Hopper, handled the progress assessments of the rehabilitation group, but he was out for the week, so Belle had volunteered in his place. It was a fairly straightforward job. She just had to ask a series of questions and give a few short tests to assess the cryptids’ mental state and self control. She had done one for Ruby just a few days ago, and Belle couldn’t help but to slip in a few questions of her own. She found herself curious about the werewolf who had grown up not even knowing she was a werewolf. If Ruby noticed anything, she never mentioned it.

“We’ll start with some word association,” said Belle. Ruby sat across from her, leaning her head against the bars that separated them.

“Sure,” said Ruby.

“Sun.”

“Daytime.”

“Meadow.”

“Flowers.”

“Moon.”

“Werewolf,” said Ruby. Her expression became more glum.

Belle looked at the list of words that Hopper had prepared. The became increasingly sinister as the list went down, with things like “hunt,” “blood,” and “murderer.” Belle knew she wasn’t supposed to, but she through in a few words of her own, things like “fern” and “garden” to break up all the ones that upset Ruby. The last word was interesting, though. It was “Ruby.”

“Beast,” said Ruby in response.

Belle looked up from her tablet, watching Ruby closely.

“You’re not a beast,” she said.

“I ate someone. I don’t think it gets more beastly than that.”

Belle didn’t know how to respond. She didn’t want to offer comfort, because Ruby obviously did not want to be comforted. But she wasn’t going to help Ruby flagellate herself either. Instead, Belle just said, “Let’s move on to the questions. How is your physical training going?”

“I can change into the wolf when I want to now, but I’m still struggling with controlling myself and changing back from the wolf.”

Belle made a note on her tablet before continuing. “Last week was the full moon. How did you feel during that?”

“I turned into the wolf and did that to the wall.” Ruby pointed back to a set of claw marks in the concrete.

“Are you still blacking out every time you turn?”

“No, I can remember flashes now, but it’s confusing.”

“Have you ever reacted violently toward a romantic partner, a girlfriend or boyfriend?” That was one of Belle’s personal questions.

“No,” said Ruby, looking a little confused.

“Have you had a boyfriend or girlfriend to react to?”

“Yes.”

Belle looked up at Ruby, waiting for her to say more, but she didn’t.

“Which one? Erm, Dr. Hopper likes me to be specific,” said Belle.

“Both, I guess.” Ruby looked completely confused now.

Belle decided she had pressed enough into Ruby’s personal life for now, so she went back to Dr. Hopper’s questions.

***

Agent David Nolan was back from the case he had been working. What had started as a minor investigation into some illegal and conspicuous magic had turned to a several weeks long ordeal. Now that the offenders had all been arrested and processed, David was just happy to be home in DC. He was given a few days off after the long case, but now he was back at headquarters, training with another agent named Safir Kay. They circled around each other on the sparring mats, in front of a small crowd that had gathered in the gym.

Safir was smaller than David and slenderly built, but he was not an opponent to be underestimated. He was strong and fast, really fast. He liked to say it was because his grandmother was a buraq, a flying horse that could leap as far as she could see with one bound. David thought Safir was probably just messing with them, though.

Safir ducked and landed a blow on David’s shoulder before he could block. Safir then moved quickly out of reach to plan his next strike. This time when Safir darted forward, David was ready for him, and was able to hit him in the face. Safir rolled away from David and got to his feet, rubbing his cheek a bit. Safir managed to land the next few hits. He unleashed an onslaught, boxing David in the face and chest with inhuman speed. Then Safir crouched and spun, kicking the legs out from under David and sending him falling heavily to the floor.

David was thinking about tapping out, when a feeling of euphoria came over him. He found that he could no longer feel the pain from Safir’s blows, couldn’t feel any hesitation or fear at all. Instead a sort of giddy rage was pulsing through him. He stood, knowing that his face no longer looked like his face. His mouth had extended and grown sizeable sharp teeth, like a bear’s muzzle, and claws snapped out of his fingers, as he fully entered the berserker state. He roared at Safir, and then lunged, tackling the other man to the ground. Safir was quick to tap out of the fight after that and David released him.

David felt himself begin to calm after that. His face and hands returned to normal, and the feeling of battle euphoria subsided. He helped Safir to his feet. Safir brushed himself off and looked over to the side of the room.

“That’s cheating,” Safir said, not sounded very upset, more amused. He was looking at Director White, who was watching from the sidelines.

David went over to the director and put his arm around her.

“He’s right, you know,” David said.

Mary Margaret gave him her most innocent look.

“Inducing the berserker state in me during a sparring match definitely counts as cheating,” he said.

“Is it though? Or is it just using your natural advantage. Agent Kay doesn’t hesitate to use his superior speed.”

“I don’t think it’s _my_ natural advantage if you help me.”

“It’s not like you can’t enter the berserker state without me. I just, you know, gave you a nudge. It’s what we’re meant to do, valkyries and berserkers. It’s like we’re made for each other,” she said.

“Whatever you say, Director.”

“Take me to lunch, Agent?” she asked.

How could he refuse?

***

The oracle sat on her high chair, breathing in the smokes that drifted up through the crack in the floor. She savored each fume and the information it brought to her. Usually she looked all over the world, keeping a broad view on all the important happenings across the continents. Now, however, she was focused on one small county in Maine, watching the residents go about their day.

There was man standing behind the counter in a shop full of odd and often useless items. He looked about fifty years old, but she knew he was much older, older than the Bureau itself. He was a lost soldier in a world that had changed rapidly around him. She wondered if he missed the pieces of himself that he had lost. He stood calmly enough, but there was a hurricane of anger and disappointment inside him. She could feel it.

There was the sheriff, sitting in her station with a telepath and a human. She was keeping secrets from her mother. The sheriff had found the killer she sought, but she had told no one about it, other than the deputy who already knew. Her reason for keeping the secret was mysterious. One could guess that the sheriff was merely grateful to the killer for saving her life, but the oracle suspected there was more to it than that.

As for the killer, the vampiric witch, she was asleep at home, not very interesting on first look, but her dreams were interesting. She dreamed of horses and hunting dogs and a father who she loved and hated at the same time. She dreamed of burnt bodies in coffins and storms over the ocean. Then she woke up and went to serve drinks in a bar with a fake smile on her face.

There was the fox spirit, so far from home, but finding a home. She was a hero back where she was born. She had saved her town from a monster, but the weight of their expectations had caused her to flee all the way across the world. The hero’s burden was just too much. She didn’t tell her new friends about what she had done, not even the one she loved most. She was learning to build cabinets and living her life without reverence from the people around her.

There was the selkie, who went everyday to work beside the ocean that she could no longer touch. Each crash of the waves was a like a taunt, a jeer at her and what she had once been able to do. She longed for it with a ceaseless ache in her heart. She loved the fox demon, but she also felt incapable of love. She was already incomplete, so how could she offer a piece of herself to another.

There were the spirits of the forest, guarding their trees and avoiding the rare humans who walked through their woods.

And there was the boy. The oracle watched him the longest. He was going to be interesting, that was certain. Though which direction he would be interesting in was yet to be decided.

The oracle, who saw so much and told so little, watched them all. She watched them and she began to laugh, a sound that rose up and echoed back to her in the empty cavern.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We'll get back to Storybrooke County next chapter. Please comment below!


	10. Ain't No Grave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> C/W: brief scene with some violence during a sexual situation.

_ The dead must die forever. _

Euripides, “Alcestis”

***

The sound of the table saw rang out, metallic and grating, but muffled through Mulan’s ear muffs. She pushed the wood carefully across the saw to cut off the piece she needed. Marco had started her out slowly, working with drills and sawzalls, but she had graduated up to the miter saw and then the table saw. They had some leftover wood from their last job, so Mulan had asked if she could use it to build a coffee table for the house. Marco had agreed, even helped her with the design and some of the trickier bits of carpentry. It was a fairly simple table, but she was proud with how it was coming along.

Marco interrupted her work to offer her some coffee that he had just made. She switched off the saw and followed him from the shop into the house. It was a small place, but comfortable and full of beautiful wooden furniture that Marco had made.

“You look like you’re making good progress,” said Marco, pouring her the tea. “Your boy, I think he will like it.”

“He’s not my boy. He’s my roommate’s,” Mulan reminded him.

Mulan and Marco didn’t talk much when they were working. The sound of the power tools tended to drown out all small talk, but on the days when he invited her in for coffee or tea, he usually asked about Henry. Marco had had a son of his own once. There was a picture of the two of them hanging up over the dining table, Marco with his arm around a boy with a round face and bright red hair. August was his name. He had died about two years ago when a drunk driver had swerved onto the sidewalk and hit him. Mulan couldn’t imagine the pain that Marco went through, and she didn’t want to pry too deep into his life. He spoke pretty freely about it, though, which was probably healthy.

“Do you think you and your girlfriend will have one of your own someday?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. We haven’t really talked about it.” Mulan took a sip of her coffee and burned her tongue.

“You are both young. But I will tell you, there is no feeling in the world like holding your child.” He stared at the picture of August, looking lost in his own home. Mulan didn’t know what to say, so she took another big sip of the too hot coffee.

***

A week later Marco made Mulan lunch, nothing fancy, just peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but it was nice. He had been in a strange mood all day, sort of not there. Usually he was very focused and in tune to what they were working on, but today his mind seemed to be drifting to other places. Mulan was a little concerned he would cut a finger off on accident, so she was the one who suggested they take a lunch break. She sat at the table, trying to make small talk in between bites of her sandwich, but Marco wasn’t in much of a mood for conversation. He went over to the kitchen window and looked out.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he asked, out of the blue.

Mulan went instantly tense. Usually when she had the phrase “one of them” directed at her, it was followed by either some racist bullshit or some homophobic bullshit. She wasn’t in the mood for either.

“You’re one of the beings, the ones with special powers,” he continued.

“I-I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

He smiled at her and she could tell she didn’t fool him.

“I have lived in this town for over thirty years. I know there are strange things that happen here that do not happen in other towns. In my home in Italy we never saw big hairy men in the woods or birds made of fire flying through the air. But here, such things happen. And I have seen your eyes. Sometimes they are brown and sometimes they are yellow, so I think perhaps you are one of the beings.”

Mulan was stunned as he spoke, and a little angry at herself for being so obvious.

“Don’t worry, I will keep your secret, but may I show you something?” he asked.

Mulan nodded, still unsure if she should go along or just run for it. Her curiosity got the better of her, though, so she went with Marco as he led her to the locked door of the basement and opened it. She followed him down the wooden staircase and into the stone room at the bottom. It seemed pretty standard at first glance. There was a washing machine and dryer, a few bottles of wine in a small rack, some broken tools that he must be trying to fix, and several storage boxes. Then she noticed a large freezer lying horizontally in the corner. She found her feet dragging as Marco led her over to the freezer, dreading what was inside. He opened it and Mulan felt her gut twist as what she feared was confirmed.

Inside, lying on a bed of ice, was a boy of about nine with bright red hair.

“I just - I could not let him go just yet,” said Marco.

Mulan backed away from the freezer. 

“Why are you showing me this?” she asked.

“I thought if beings such as you can exist, then maybe it is possible for my boy to live another day. He did not deserve to die the way he did, so young. But there must be some way, somehow, to bring him back.” Marco reached his hand down as if to touch the boy in the freezer, but he stopped and pulled his hand back.

“There are things that are impossible, even for us, and bringing the dead back to life is one of them,” she said, shaking her head.

“There must be some way. There must be.”

“I’m sorry.” Mulan forced herself to walk over to the freezer and close it. She took Marco’s hand and pulled him gently away from it and back up the stairs. He allowed himself to be led, and she could see all the determination leave him. He seemed to curl into himself, to withdraw from him own body. She felt as if she had killed his son all over again. She took him to the couch, and left him there, not knowing what else she could do for him.

***

Regina walked through the dining room, now partially furnished thanks to Mulan’s carpentry apprenticeship and Aurora’s thrift shopping skills. Henry was sitting at the table, typing on the laptop that Regina had bought for them all. She was about to walk right by him, but then she noticed what was in his hand.

“Henry, is that Mulan’s credit card?” she asked.

“Yep,” he said.

“And do you have her permission to use it?”

Henry stopped typing and looked up, not quite looking guilty, but looking as he was wondering if he should be guilty.

“Well, not exactly.”

“What are you doing with it?” she asked.

He turned the laptop to show her. 

“I’m buying some books. I was thinking it might help us to have some books on monsters, so we know what to expect.”

Regina read over some of the titles: “Cryptozoology,” “Cryptids, Monsters, and Creatures of Myth, a Field Guide,” and “American Folklore” were at the top of his list.

“Henry, this one is over sixty dollars,” she said, pointing to it.

“Yeah, but it has really good pictures. Pleeease,” he whined.

“Just get the kindle version. It’s cheaper. And ask Mulan next time if you can use her credit card.”

Henry agreed and happily began ordering the books. Of all the things he could steal a credit card to buy, Regina supposed that books were not the worst.

***

It was Aurora’s night to cook dinner, which meant that they were having something mild and probably pretty tasteless. Aurora wasn’t the worst cook in the world, but she was a little too hesitant with her spices. Regina went ahead and got the hot sauce out of the fridge and put it out on the table.

Mulan came home then, later than she usually did. She looked a little ruffled, and a little ruffled on Mulan was like seeing a lot ruffled on anyone else. She tended to be quite stoic.

“Marco kept you pretty late tonight,” said Regina.

“Fine,” said Mulan, not paying the least bit of attention to what Regina had said.

“Are you okay?” asked Aurora. She came out of the kitchen with the bowl of mashed potatoes she was working on.

“Yep,” said Mulan. She was pacing back and forth in the living room. 

“Then why are you all shaky and strange?” Aurora asked.

“Oh, just because Marco is keeping his son who’s been dead for two years in a freezer in his basement and he wants me to resurrect the kid.”

They were silent for a good long while, each trying to process the information. They had all met Marco before, though briefly. He was fully human and seemed like an honest and good-hearted sort of man. But it turned out he had some skeletons in his closet - or a body in his freezer, close enough. Henry was usually the first to break long silences, but he stayed quiet. It was hard for a ten year old to understand his own grief when he had it, let alone another person’s. Aurora ended up being the first one to speak.

“His dead son,” she said.

“Yep,” said Mulan, still pacing.

“In a freezer,” said Aurora.

“In the basement.”

Aurora set aside the mashed potatoes and went over to take Mulan’s hand and get her to stand still. 

“That’s horrible,” said Aurora. Mulan agreed. She seemed to calm down a little with Aurora holding her hand.

“Gina?” said Henry quietly. He had started calling her by the nickname a few days ago. Any other person would never be allowed to call her that, but coming from Henry she didn’t mind it. She bent down so he could whisper to her.

“Isn’t bringing people back to life one of your super powers?”

If only, thought Regina.

“No, all I can do is reanimate the dead bodies. It’s like working a puppet. The body can move and even talk, but I’m the one pulling the strings. It has no soul, no want, no will of its own. True resurrection is the hardest and most expensive magic there is.”

Henry seemed to accept what she had told him, or so she thought. But a few days later a book arrived in the mail called “Lazarus: a Story of Resurrection.” Regina had a very bad feeling about this.

***

Emma felt the mattress of the bed dip down as something or someone new got onto it. She opened her eyes and looked to see a woman with black hair and beautiful brown eyes sitting at the foot of the bed. Emma sat up to get a better look at her. The woman was wearing a black tank top that said “CBGB & OMFUG” in white letters, and tight black pants. Her long hair was hanging loose and so shiny over her shoulders and Emma was tempted to reach out and touch it.

“Regina,” said Emma.

Regina smiled. She moved forward, crawling on her hands and knees up the bed until she sat again next to Emma, with their faces just inches apart. She reached up and stroked her hand down Emma’s face. Emma’s heart began to pound even harder in her chest.

“I’ve been looking for you,” said Emma.

“Why haven’t you found me yet?” asked Regina. She leaned back from Emma and then flopped down on her back, so that they lay side by side. Emma looked down at her and the woman arched her back a little, causing her chest to rise, before she settled herself back down.

“I’m trying,” said Emma. She brought her hand to Regina’s cheek and cupped her face for a moment. Regina said nothing, just smiled at Emma. Her skin was warm and smooth beneath Emma’s touch. Emma trailed her fingers over to her mouth and brushed them against her lips. In response, Regina flicked her tongue out to lick them. She took Emma’s hand in her own and moved it down from her face to her throat, where she applied mild pressure so that Emma was just barely choking her. Emma bent down and kissed her, not bothering to be soft as she did so. Emma covered Regina with her body, still keeping her hand around her neck. As amazing as Regina’s lips had looked, the way they tasted and felt was something truly spectacular. Emma wanted to drown in her, to fill and surround herself with the other woman. There was an anxious urgency that began to arise in Emma, as if she would lose Regina forever if she did not hold her tight enough. She grabbed on and squeezed and squeezed until she could no longer feel the woman’s lips moving against hers. Emma moved off of the woman to find nothing but a cold corpse beneath her.

With a jolt, Emma shot up in bed, panting hard. It was dark, but she could tell that she was alone in the room. She was covered with a layer of cold sweat and her heart was still racing from the nightmare she had just had. It had been so incredibly vivid, wonderfully and later terrifyingly so.

She fell back onto the pillow, rubbing at her face.

Regina had killed at least four people, but probably more. She had kidnapped a ten year old boy, who she could have murdered, as well, for all Emma knew. And she had saved Emma from a sea monster. So, if Emma did the math, it all added up to one big mess. Emma knew she had to find Regina, but what she would do once she did, well, that was the big question.

***

After nearly nonstop pleading from Henry, Regina finally relented and took him over to Marco’s house. Mulan had returned to work and told them that Marco hadn’t mentioned the whole resurrection thing since he showed her August’s body. Henry had, though. He had talked about dead August and bringing dead August back to life almost non-stop. A part of Regina wanted to reanimate the empty body just to show Henry that it couldn’t be done. She wouldn’t, though. She was trying to take his optimism seriously, even if she didn’t relate to it. 

Marco answered the door and it took him a moment to recognize them.

“Ah, the roommate and the boy of Mulan. Good to see you again. Come in, come in,” he said. He brought them to his bright little kitchen and began making tea for them. 

“Listen, Mr. Geppetti,” Regina began.

“Marco, please,” he said.

“Alright, Marco. We’re here because Mulan told us about your, well, about your son.”

Marco stopped what he was doing, looking almost frozen.

“Resurrection is an almost impossible thing to do. I don’t want to get your hopes up. In fact, I don’t think you should have any hopes at all. But if you’ll let us, we would be willing to try.”

Marco agreed before she had even finished speaking. So much for hopelessness. He was a little more hesitant to let them take the body out of the house, but Regina assured him that it was necessary to do so. She tried to get Henry to wait in the truck, but he stubbornly insisted on “helping.” As she picked up August’s body from the freezer, she looked at Henry. Just a few months ago, he had been terrified of demons, and now he was standing next to the corpse of a boy his age, and he barely flinched. Regina wondered if that meant that he was a tough kid or if he was going to one day require extensive therapy to deal with all the things he’d seen.  _ You’re still better than the Laroys _ , she told herself.

They had packed an extra large cooler full of ice to transport August. Regina placed the body carefully inside and then carried the cooler out to the truck. Henry waved goodbye to Marco as they drove away.

“Don’t get your hopes up too high, either,” Regina reminded him as they drove.

“I know. But I really want to help Marco.”

“I know you do. I can’t imagine what he went through, losing his son like that.” She looked over at Henry and stopped talking. 

They pulled up to the Storybrooke County Hospital. Regina got a few strange looks for the large cooler she was carrying, but they ducked down the first staircase they could find and headed for the morgue, away from the bustling hallways. Whale was inside, though not alone this time. A man in nurse’s scrubs was helping Whale to remove and weigh organs from a cadaver. The man was pale, bald, and had a white goatee. Based on his complexion alone, Regina assumed he was also a zombie.

“You’re not due for a delivery for another week,” said Whale.

“That’s not what I’m here for,” she said. She set the cooler down on one of the empty operation tables. “I want your help with something.”

“Well, if you want me to buy the body in that cooler, you’re out of luck. I need my product to be way fresher. That boy, maybe,” said Whale, gesturing at Henry with a cheeky grin.

Regina hissed at him.

“Kidding, kidding,” he said.

“I’m not selling the body. I want to resurrect it,” she said.

Whale looked at the nurse and then burst out laughing. The nurse was little more reserved and merely sneered at them.

“Oh, that’s a good one. You really had me going. Now, what do you really need?” Whale asked.

Regina crossed her arms and morphed into her vampire face, sunken eyed and fully fanged.

The nurse flinched away from her and Whale’s smile dropped.

“God, you’re serious,” said Whale.

She returned her face to normal and said, “And I want you to help me. I’ll even pay you.”

Whale walked over to them, taking the bloody glove off of his right hand, which he then offered to Regina to shake.

“Done. But I’m not cheap,” he said when she shook his hand.

***

August Geppetti had some pretty extensive organ damage from being hit by the car, so job one was repairing his body. Whale performed the surgeries with the help of the nurse, a man named Igor Bogomolov. Together they swapped out the organs that couldn’t be saved with ones cut out of the other bodies in the morgue and inserted a few rods and pins into August’s broken bones. It looked like a lot of work from what Regina saw of it, but re-building the body was the easy part. Bringing back the soul, the personality, the essence, whatever it was called, that was going to be nearly impossible.

“He’s all yours,” said Whale, once he and Igor had finished. Regina checked over the body once. She couldn’t see what was going on inside, but it looked in good condition from the outside. She made Henry wait outside the morgue, while she, Whale, and Igor attempted the resurrection. She didn’t want him near the dark magic that the spell would require.

The spell itself was a blend of her usual reanimation spell and some of the ideas from Henry’s Lazarus book. Regina started by cutting her palm with one of the scalpels and using the blood to paint intricate symbols on one of morgue tables. She picked up the body and laid it down over the symbols and then added a few more directly to August’s skin. She placed some objects around the body, things that would hopefully appeal to one of the various psychopomps. They needed some higher being to bring the soul back to the body, so she set out the offerings of crow feathers, turtle shells, a set of scales, a bowl of milk and honey, and some tobacco. She also lit candles and turned off the fluorescent lights of the morgue.

Then came the spell itself. Regina began to chant, quietly at first, but with growing insistence at each passing sentence. The flames in the candles began to grow larger, illuminating the room with white hot light. Out of the corner of her eyes, she began to see shadows darting around the morgue, but any time she tried to look at them directly, they disappeared. There was a pounding and rushing in her ears that she couldn’t tell whether it was her own heart pumping or something outside of herself. She also began to hear voices, faint and indistinct, but undeniably there. She reached the end of the passage she was reading from and the candles flared up one last time before going out. 

“Now,” she said.

Whale placed defibrillator paddles on August’s chest and sent a jolt of electricity straight into his heart. The room was silent. Igor went to turn on the lights again.

And then, August’s hand twitched.

Regina actually let herself feel a moment of hope as they watched August’s eyes flicker open. It didn’t last long, though. August took one look at the bright light hanging over him and let out an unearthly scream. He lunged at Whale, grabbing the doctor by the throat and squeezing as hard as his little nine year old hands would allow him. Whale pried him off fairly easily, but August continued to thrash and a yell in Whale’s grasp. Regina grabbed August’s feet to keep him from kicking out. August bared his teeth and snapped at them, his eyes rolling around like a crazed horse.

Henry came back into the room then and was staring at August with a horrified expression.

“Henry, go back outside. It isn’t safe,” said Regina.

Henry didn’t, though. He walked toward August, still with the stunned and scared look on his face. He reached out and touched August gently on the arm.

August stilled in their arms. He stopped trying to kick and hit and instead began to blink. He had that disconcerted look of someone who had just woken up and hadn’t quite remembered that their dream was not real.

“Where am I?” asked August.

Whale nearly dropped him from the shock of it, but he managed to hang on. Regina set August’s feet back on the floor.

“You’re in the hospital. You were in an accident, but you’re alright now.”

“Where’s my dad?” he asked.

“He’ll be here soon,” she said. She turned to Henry, planning on congratulating him or asking him how the hell he had done that. She never got the chance, though, because when she looked over at Henry, she noticed the blood flowing out of his nose, just a moment before he collapsed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Please comment!


	11. In Hell I'll Be in Good Company

_ We’re mortals. We must bear disasters lightly. _

Euripides, “Medea”

***

Regina was frantic as she rushed Henry upstairs. Several of the doctors and nurses ran up to her, asking what had happened.

“I don’t know. He just collapsed. His nose was bleeding,” she said, her voice coming out far higher and weaker than it usually was.

“Let’s get him into one of the exam rooms,” said the doctor.

One of the nurses pulled Regina aside to talk to her while the doctors placed Henry onto a hospital bed and began to wheel him away.

“No, I need to be with him,” said Regina.

“You need to let the doctors do their work. I promise they will do everything they can to help him. Right now, the best way you can help is by answering some questions for me,” said the nurse.

“Okay.” Regina rubbed at one of her eyes and took a breath.

“What’s his name?”

“Henry. Henry Mills.”

“And yours.”

“Regina Mills.”

“You’re related?”

“Yes, he’s my...son,” she said, looking down the hallway where they had taken him.

“Does he have any allergies to any medications, food, or anything else?”

“No, none that we’ve found,” said Regina. She wasn’t sure actually. She was realizing that she knew very little about Henry’s medical history. She felt unbearably small all of a sudden, standing in the middle of the hospital hallway and surrounded by the teeming crowd of patients, doctors, and families. Why did she ever think she could do this? She did a shit job taking care of herself, so of course she couldn’t take care of a child. Now Henry was going to die because of her stupidity and arrogance.

“I know this is hard, but can you tell me exactly what happened?” asked the nurse.

***

“New job, sheriff,” said Ashley.

“What have we got?”

“The hospital always contacts us if there are any suspicious injuries or illnesses. One of the nurses just called. She said that they have a young boy there whose body is shutting down. They can’t find any injuries or evidence of disease, but something is draining the life out of him. She said the boy’s mother was a little strange, as well.”

“Alright, I’ll look into it,” said Emma.

The past few days had been pretty mundane at the station. There had just been a few run of the mill, non-cryptid crimes. She had arrested a guy for public intoxication, scolded some kids for vandalism, and rescued a cow that had gotten stuck in some freezing mud. From the sound of this, though, she might have an inhuman offender to take care of, the first one since Ursula and Ariel.

She grabbed her coat and headed for the county hospital.

***

“So...do you like Pokémon?” asked Whale.

August frowned up at him and shook his head.

_ Well, shit _ , thought Whale,  _ what do kids like now? _

Regina had run upstairs with Henry, forgetting all about the boy that she had just brought back to life. Igor had left not long after, saying he had some work to do. Which meant that Whale was stuck with babysitting duty. The kid wasn’t much of a talker, but he did ask where his dad was every few minutes.

“Buddy, I don’t even know who your dad is. You need to wait for Regina to come back, and then she’ll call him.”

August began to walk around the morgue, looking at the various tools and the leftover items from the spell. They had cut his shirt off during his surgeries, so he was shivering a little.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a brain in the weigh scale.

“Hopefully about five hundred dollars,” said Whale.

A woman burst into the morgue, then. She was beautiful, and so Whale stood and prepared to turn on his classic charm, but the woman stopped him with a withering scowl.

“I’m here to take August home. Regina called me,” she said.

“Do you know my dad?” asked August.

The woman’s expression softened when she looked at the boy. “Yes, I work with your dad. My name’s Mulan.” She took off her jacket and gave it to him. Without a word to Whale, she led August out of the morgue.

“You’re welcome,” he called after them.

***

When Emma arrived at the hospital, a nurse led her through the hallways to the dying boy. He was in one of the private rooms and looked tiny in the hospital bed. His eyes were shut and he was still breathing at least. He had brown hair and pale skin, made paler by the sickness. He didn’t look like Emma, but she recognized him instantly, knew who he was. He was not just Henry Laroy, the boy who had been kidnapped, but he was the baby she had given up over ten years ago. Emma went over and brushed his hair back from his sweaty forehead. She could feel his soul burning brightly beneath his skin. He was weak, but she could tell he was a fighter. He would need to be.

“I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Henry,” she said, quiet enough that the nurse didn’t hear her.

“His mom said he just collapsed. She couldn’t give us any more of an explanation. It could be a case of poisoning or illness, but he is showing no signs of having a neurotoxin in his system and he doesn’t even have a fever,” said the nurse.

“Where is his mom?”

“She was in here last time I checked on him. Must have ducked out for something. I have to get back to my rounds, but I’ll come back in a few minutes if you have any more questions, Sheriff.” The nurse left.

Emma went and sat next to Henry, taking his chart from the foot of the bed with her. She read over it and took a few notes on his condition and his “mother’s” name. She looked up at his vital signs monitor every few seconds. His heartbeat was pretty slow and his blood pressure much lower than it should be. It was unfair that the kid had held in there, had survived for so long, only to get on his deathbed right as Emma found him.

Eleven years ago Emma had been a slightly too wild teenager with slightly too strict parents. It was a volatile situation to be in. Every new rule laid out by Mary Margaret and David was answered with some new rebellion by Emma. She was seventeen when Neal Cassidy came into her life and he was perfect for her, not for any real virtue on his part, but rather he was the perfect unambitious slacker who smoked too much weed and listened to loud and terrible music. Her parents would absolutely hate him, and so Emma loved him. Perhaps she had really loved him, as well. She still wasn’t sure. He wasn’t an evil person at his core, though he wasn’t exactly a great one either. He was utterly mediocre when it came to his morals and talents, like the Cleveland of people. 

Neal hadn’t been a cryptid, though he said that his mom was. She was nymph of some sort, and she had the characteristic fickle love of a nymph. She had run off one day, leaving Neal to be raised by a bitter single father. Looking back, Neal’s messed up family dynamics were probably responsible, at least in part, for his less than enthusiastic reaction to Emma telling him that she was pregnant. If she remembered correctly, he had sat in stunned silence for ten minutes, yelled about condom inefficiency for fifteen, and then left town never to be seen again. David had wanted to track him down and drag him back to DC, but Emma insisted they let him go. Years later she found out that he had died in a car crash along with his new girlfriend.

So, that had left Emma in quite a situation. If the baby had been female, then she would have likely been a valkyrie, like Emma and Mary Margaret, or maybe a nymph like Neal’s mother. But the baby was a boy and he wasn’t a berserker like David. Even in the womb, they could tell that he was just a human baby.

_ Our life is no life for a human baby _ , Mary Margaret had said.  _ It’s too dangerous _ , David had added. They had waxed on for days, but it all added up to the same thing. Their lifestyle of working for the Bureau of Cryptid Concealment, a lifestyle that Emma was expected to follow, was simply a bad fit for a human child. At the time, it had seemed like the only option and the right option. Emma had been barely more than a child herself and humans seemed so fragile to her back then. She could imagine a million horrible scenarios of the baby getting hurt, even getting killed because of her. It had felt right as she had signed the paperwork and handed the baby over to the lady who worked for the adoption agency. She had imagined him getting adopted by some nice family that lived in the suburbs and had a golden retriever. Now, looking at him, supine and still on the cot, the guilt hit her like a tidal wave, so strong that it would have swept her away if she wasn’t holding on so tightly to the chair.

Regina, the vampiric murderer, entered the room a few minutes after Emma. She was carrying a book under one arm and a stuffed dog from the gift shop in the other. She stopped when she saw Emma.

“You’re the sheriff, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I am. My name’s Emma Swan.” Emma’s words came out stiff and weird, though she tried to stay calm.

Regina had looked upset when she entered the room, but Emma could almost physically see a mask of controlled politeness slide over Regina’s face.

“How can I help you, Sheriff Swan? I don’t suppose you’re here to thank me for pulling you out of the water.”

“I’m afraid not. Can we speak in private?” Emma asked. Regina set down the book and the toy next to Henry, and then followed Emma from the room. They walked down the hallway until Emma spotted a storage closet. She grabbed Regina by the arm and pulled her roughly into the closet. Emma pushed Regina up against one of the shelves, still keeping a tight hold on her arm.

“What are you doing?” Regina asked, her mask slipping as true panic set in.

“What did you do to him?” Emma asked.

“What are you talking about?” Regina struggled against the grip, but Emma was stronger than her.

“I know what you are. Did you suck his blood or curse him? What did you do, Regina?”

Regina looked like she wanted to yell something angry at Emma, but then she leaned her head back against the shelf. A couple of tears managed to fight their way out of her eyes and roll down her cheeks.

“I never should have let him do it,” she said.

“Do what?”

“The spell. Henry wanted me to do a spell to resurrect a little boy. I should have - should have said no, but he was just so eager. So I did it. I brought the boy back, but he came back wrong. He was violent and scared, but then Henry touched him and the boy became himself again. It was like Henry brought his soul back.”

“What? What are you talking about? Henry is human.”

“I thought so too at first. Now, I don’t know. After he touched the boy, Henry’s nose began to bleed and he fainted.” Regina slumped even more against the wall, deflated. Emma let go of her and took a step back.

“Ok. Ok. We have more to talk about, but for now, let’s just figure out how to help Henry,” said Emma.

“How?” asked Regina. Her voice sounded small.

“I have some resources I can contact.”

“You mean the B.C.C.?” Regina glanced at the door as if she was considering just making a run for it. 

“Yes.”

“Are you- What are you going to tell them?”

“Little boy tried a resurrection spell and got hurt.”

“That’s it?”

“For now,” said Emma. That’s about all she could process for now. She took all the other things, all her mixed up feelings toward Henry and Regina and she shoved them into a deep corner of her mind. She would sort through them later, once Henry was better.

***

Regina sat in the one of the hospital chairs next to Henry’s bed, listening to the steady beat of his heart on the EKG machine. The doctors had managed to stabilize him and had started him on the treatment advised by the B.C.C. There was an IV of some foul smelling liquid in the boy’s arm, and he did seem to be improving. His face had more color in it and he hadn’t seized in the past two hours, so the stinking mixture must be doing something right.

Mulan and Aurora showed up, but left soon after to get some dinner for Regina. With everything that had happened, she had forgotten to eat all day. 

On the other side of the Henry’s bed, the sheriff was fast asleep in one of the other chairs. She had nodded off not too long after she had made the call to the B.C.C. Her head was drooping to the side, so that blonde hair fell across her face. Her brow was scrunched into a frown, though, as if she was angry at her dreams. Regina sighed, wishing Mulan and Aurora would hurry up so she didn’t have to be the only conscious person in the room.

***

Emma looked down at her belly, which was swollen with pregnancy. It rose up like burial mound from her torso, holding inside of it the body of her child. She could feel him kicking and she smiled. She couldn’t wait to meet him. He kicked harder inside of her, a little too hard. She hunched over, rubbing her stomach to try to still him. The kicking turned into a new sensation, one that was far more painful. It felt like he was trying to scratch his way out. Emma began to scream and then her stomach was ripped open and a tiny, clawed hand burst out.

Emma twitched and found herself on a misty battlefield strewn with bodies. She almost couldn’t seen the grass, the ground was so thick with them, and what little grass was there to be seen was stained red and yellow with their blood and bile. In the distance she could see two dark shapes through the fog. She walked closer to them and slowly the forms began to take shape. They were two wolves, one gray and one brown, feasting ravenously on the viscera of the fallen warriors. Behind them stood a man with one eye. As Emma came near enough to them, the man looked up and pointed at her, causing the wolves to snap their heads up, their muzzles still dripping blood. They snarled and lunged at her.

Emma was holding a baby boy with brown eyes in her arms, singing him an old song that her mother had once sung to her. He was a quiet baby. He never fussed. She placed him in his bassinet and went into the other room to look out the window. A vulture flew overhead, moving in a lazy formation. There was a noise from the other room, but Emma stayed glued to the window, watching the hypnotizing drifting of the vulture in the sky. The sun changed places and the vulture was gone. Emma must have lost track of time. She went to check on the baby, finding him dead and pale from blood loss.

Emma felt a hand on her shoulder, shaking her and she jolted upward. She found herself once again in Henry’s hospital room, breathing hard and covered in sweat. Regina was standing next to her, hand still outstretched. She looked concerned.

“I think you were having a nightmare,” said Regina.

“Yeah, I was. Um, thanks for waking me up.”

Emma had been having a lot of them lately. She rubbed her eyes and tried to shake off the disturbing vision she had seen. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was a message from the Bureau.

“Belle sent over some more information,” she told Regina, as she scanned through the text. Regina bent over her chair, placing her face close to Emma’s to read over her shoulder.

“It says that the treatments they suggested earlier may only be temporary. Without a more permanent solution, Henry could still die,” said Emma.

“What is the permanent solution?

“A mandrake root,” she said.

***

Regina and Emma had left Mulan and Aurora at the hospital to watch over Henry while they went plant hunting. The Bureau could send over a mandrake root, but it would take over eight hours to get to Storybrooke, and they weren’t sure Henry had that long. 

All  _ Mandragora _ plants possessed an unusual shape and a set of tropane alkaloids that caused hallucinations and delirium. Only one variety, however, had the ability to heal someone in Henry’s condition. It was  _ Mandragora vitalis _ , the vital mandrake, a dangerous plant that screamed louder than a banshee when it was uprooted and killed anyone close enough to hear it. 

“It says that traditionally people would use dogs to collect the mandrakes,” read Emma, as Regina drove them out towards the house.

“I’ve got a dog,” said Regina.

“They’d plug their own ears with wax and tie the dog to the root. Then they’d throw a treat and the dog would pull up the mandrake when it ran to fetch the treat...which would kill the dog instantly.”

“We can’t kill Hank. Can we just hitch it to the truck? I don’t mind if it dies.”

Emma shrugged and nodded her head a little. It could work.

“But we need to find one first,” she said.

“I may know of some people who can help us,” said Regina.

Regina drove them to the house, stopping only to get some earplugs and some of Mulan’s carpentry ear muffs. She then led Emma out into the woods, shining a flashlight through the trees as she searched for a tall, white birch.

“Alistair? Are you there?” Regina called, seemingly to the tree. There was no response, so Regina continued, “I know you don’t know me, but I’m Henry’s guardian. He’s very sick and we need your help to find a cure for him.”

They waited and then a little bearded face poked out of the upper branches of the tree. A gnome-like man climbed down and came to stand in front of Regina, craning his head to look up at her. A translucent raccoon followed him down and a girl made of leaves stayed up in the branches of the birch, watching them from above. Regina recognized them all from Henry’s drawings.

“What’s happened to the lad?” asked Alistair.

Regina told him about bringing the boy back to the life. Ivy looked horrified and climbed up higher and further away from them. Toaket made a lot of raccoon sounds, but Regina couldn’t tell what emotion they were conveying.

“We need a mandrake root,” said Emma. Her hands were on her hips as she regarded the forest spirits.

“And who are you, then?” asked Alistair.

“I’m Emma Swan, the sheriff. I’m just here to help.”

Toaket had something to say about that, but Alistair didn’t translate it. The spirits looked over Regina and Emma for a long moment, as if sizing them up.

“We can get you one,” Alistair said.

Toaket began to run into the woods, stopping ever so often to make sure that Emma and Regina were keeping up. Her raccoon legs were pretty short, but she could move quickly on them. Ivy followed along behind them, keeping her distance. They air began to feel warmer around them and the trees suddenly had leaves on them again. Everything grew lush and thick and they felt that they had somehow stepped back into summer. Toaket led them into a meadow and went over to a low plant with wrinkled green leaves and pale purple flowers. She pointed to it. Emma and Regina put in the earplugs and covered their ears with ear muffs. After a moment’s hesitation, Emma reached down to grab it, but Toaket slapped her hand away. Emma took off her ear muffs, frustrated.

“You’re earmuffs aren’t enough. You’ll die if you pull him up,” said Ivy. It was the first words she had said to them. She was standing at the edge of the meadow, still amongst the trees.

“How, then?” asked Emma.

Ivy moved forward and came to kneel down beside the mandrake. She began to sing to it, her voice clear and lovely. It wasn’t a language that Emma or Regina could understand, but it was a soothing melody, like a lullaby. Even Toaket seemed affected by it, and she swayed a little, her eyelids drooping. Ivy shook her to wake her up, not breaking her song. Then Ivy stood and took Regina and Emma by the wrists in her own rough hands. She led them away from the mandrake, still singing. She motioned for them to put their earmuffs back on and they did so. Toaket grabbed a handful of the leaves between her paws and yanked, pulling the root free from the ground. They heard no sound, but they could see her wince as if from a terrible sound. After a moment, Toaket motioned to them to come back and remove their ear protection. She held up the mandrake to them. Under its leaves was a thick brown taproot, roughly humanoid in shape and squirming in a most unpleasant way. 

“He will be good for Henry. Make his leg into a tea and then put the rest under Henry’s pillow,” said Ivy. She pointed to one of the root’s lower protrusions to show the part they should use. It did look like a leg.

“Thank you. I don’t know how I’ll repay you, but I will. I promise,” said Regina, taking the root. She seemed quite overwhelmed by it all.

“Just make Henry better. We like it when he visits,” said Ivy.

“We will,” said Emma. She placed her hand on Regina’s lower back and gently pushed her forward. They needed to get back to the hospital as soon as they could.

***

The tea smelled bitter and earthy. Regina had not washed the root very well in her haste, so there was probably some dirt in it as well. It wouldn’t be very pleasant, but she imagined Henry would forgive her. Mulan and Aurora held up the unconscious Henry into a sitting position, so Regina could pour the tea down his throat. He coughed and choked a bit, but the tea went down. Emma put the rest of the root beneath his pillow, just as Ivy had instructed.

Then all the four of them had to do was wait, not talking much as they sat around the bed. Slowly, very slowly, Henry’s heartbeat grew stronger and his breathing deeper. His hands twitched a few times and his eyes moved around under his eyelids.

Finally, after an agonizing length of time, he woke up.

Regina was the first to jump and rush over to him. She took his hand in hers and stroked his face. He looked a little confused about where he was, but relaxed as Regina began to speak softly to him.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” said Regina.

“I promise,” said Henry with a grin.

Mulan and Aurora went over to hug him, as well, and Emma hung back, wondering if she should leave them alone for awhile.

“Oh, Henry, this is Sheriff Swan. She helped save you,” said Regina. She gestured like she wanted Emma to come closer, so Emma did.

“Hi, Henry. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

“Thanks, Sheriff. And it’s nice to meet you.”

Emma could barely breathe as Henry looked at her, let alone speak. There was no recognition in his eyes as he looked at her, not that she had really expected there to be. Perhaps it was better this way. She didn’t know how he would react if he knew who she really was. He was comfortable with Regina, though, that much was obvious. He didn’t look at Regina as if she were a kidnapper and he was a scared or brainwashed child. He seemed genuinely at peace with her. Of all the scenarios that Emma expected when she finally found him - that he had been killed and eaten by the vampire, that he had been sacrificed in some ritual, that he was being slowly sucked dry - Emma had never expected to find him happy and, other than one magical mishap, healthy. She excused herself from the hospital room, leaving them to their familial moment, and went back to the sheriff’s station.

“Everything go alright, Sheriff?” Ashley asked.

Emma was quick to guard her thoughts from the telepath. She wasn’t sure if Ashley spied on her thoughts or not, and most of the time she didn’t mind much either way, but she wanted to keep this new information to herself for just a short while longer.

“Yep, just a bit of magic gone wrong. The kid is fine, though,” said Emma.

“What about the mother? The one the nurse was suspicious about?”

“Nope, nothing sinister about the mother,” said Emma, getting a slight twinge of guilt as she lied to Ashley, and later, as she lied to the Bureau. It was obvious, though, that there was more to Regina that just a murderous vampire and more to Henry than just a kidnapped human child. 


	12. Sweet Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for all the late updates. I'm crazy busy with work and school right now, so I haven't been writing as much. I'm still working hard on this story. It's just taking me longer.  
> Thanks for reading!

_ But I, being poor, have only my dreams; _

_ I have spread my dreams under your feet; _

_ Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. _

W.B. Yeats, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”

***

Henry got to spend the week watching as much TV as he wanted and eating pretty much unlimited ice cream. Regina knew she was spoiling him, but the kid had nearly died. He probably deserved to be spoiled. She brought him a cup of soup and pushed Hank out of the way so she could sit on the bed with them, watching a little bit of  _ Steven Universe _ on the TV. She wasn’t paying too close attention to the show, though, more focused on everything that had happened.

“Henry?” she said.

“Hmm,” he said, his mouth stuffed full of noodles from the soup.

“How did you do...what you did with August?”

Henry thought for a long moment, his brow scrunched up as he did so. Then he shrugged.

“I don’t know. I just did,” he said.

“Well, keep thinking about it. Let me know if you remember anything else about what you did.” She patted his foot through the blanket and stood to leave the room.

“Does this mean I could be a superhero, too?” he asked.

“I’m not sure, bud. I don’t know what this means. But, super or not, you’re my hero,” she said, and then quickly left. She shook her head a little. When had she gotten so sentimental? Probably the moment she saw the little boy hiding in the doghouse, but still, she was beginning to sound a bit like a hallmark card. 

***

Phillip and Ashley had been nagging Emma all day long to go home early. It had been a slow day for them, with no cryptid activity and very little human criminal activity either. The most exciting call they had gotten all day was when Mrs. Dearly’s dog escaped from the yard and nearly caused a wreck on Main Street. Otherwise, it was all just desk work and Emma was having trouble keeping her eyes open for it. Though it was true that most of the time Emma had trouble staying awake for paperwork, today she had an extreme case of lethargy. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She was actually having trouble remembering the last time she slept through the night without being pushed from sleep by some terrible nightmare.

Emma felt a hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently.

“I wasn’t asleep,” she said, sitting up straight and looking at Ashley’s concerned face.

“Sheriff, please just go home,” said Ashley.

Emma looked at Ashley’s vast pregnant belly. If she could power through being at work, then so could Emma.

“No, I’m fine, really. I just need another cup of coffee.” Emma stood up and swayed on her feet. Little stars clouded over her vision and Phillip ran over as if worried she would fall.

“I’m fine. It was just a head rush,” she said, sounding almost scolding toward Ashley and Phillip. 

Emma got her coffee and went back to her desk. She felt herself slump down over the desk, immediately falling fast asleep on the pile of forms she had been reading. Ashley and Phillip watched her with concern. At first, Emma had just been a little more tired than usual, yawning more and showing some bags under her eyes. After several nights of restlessness and a lack of sleep, though, the sheriff was definitely not ok. She was nodding off at her desk, in the holding cells, and even in the empty basement. If Ashley didn’t wake her within a few minutes, then Emma would start thrashing and screaming in her sleep.

It didn’t help that Ashley and Phillip didn’t know the new sheriff all that well. Emma tended to keep her private life very private. They knew the basics, that she was sent by the B.C.C. to keep an eye on all the Storybrooke weirdness, and that she was a valkyrie. They couldn’t tell, however, if her insomnia was caused by something in her personal life, if it was a medical problem, or if she was cursed by something.

A call came in for a minor case of vandalism, so Phillip went out to deal with it. Emma didn’t even twitch in her sleep at the sound of the phone ringing. Ashley went and sat beside Emma. She didn’t like to violate the privacy of her friends and colleagues with her telepathy, but she was becoming deeply worried for Emma’s well being. She closed her eyes and reached out with her mind until she could sense Emma’s thoughts.

Telepathy was nothing like it was portrayed in the movies. People didn’t think in any sort of chronological way. Ideas, emotions, memories, and images flashed through their minds in so quick and jumbled a manner that it took the utmost concentration to pull any sort of cohesive thought from it all. It didn’t help that Emma’s mind was particularly unsettled. At first, Ashley got nothing except a blast of so many different kinds of feelings in an unintelligible mashup. Then slowly, she was able to pull something more tangible from Emma. There was a baby, and a young boy, and with the images of them came contradicting feelings of guilt and relief, of fear and hope. Ashley shook Emma awake again.

“I’m awake,” said Emma, sitting upright so quickly that she nearly knocked herself out of her chair.

“Sheriff, is there, um, anything you want to talk about?” Ashley asked.

Emma stared at Ashley for a long moment.

“No, it’s just - no, it’s fine. You’re right, though. I think I should go home, try to get some real sleep,” said Emma. She gathered up her coat and left the station, leaving Ashley with more questions than answers.

***

Aurora held tightly to Mulan’s waist as they cantered along on Connie on one of the dirt roads near the house. Aurora was not terribly comfortable on the horse, but as long as Mulan was riding with her, she was ok. Connie snorted and slowed back down to a walk, and Aurora loosened her grip just a little. 

“Do you want to head back? Are you getting cold?” Mulan asked.

“No, let’s go a little farther,” said Aurora. 

The chilled air was refreshing, and, as much as Aurora loved Henry and Regina, it was nice to get a moment alone with Mulan. Their little house could get a bit crowded.

“Have you spoken to Marco?” Aurora asked.

“A little. He’s taking a two week break, so he can spend more time with August. I think he’s overwhelmed by it all. In a good way, a happy way. Did you see all the flowers he sent to Regina as a thank you?”

Aurora chuckled. The day before they had gotten a delivery from the florist, an arrangement that was larger than Hank. Regina had put it on display on their dining room table, which was pretty, but rather impractical. They had all had to start eating their meals around the coffee table in the living room.

“It wasn’t Regina, though. Not entirely. How do you think he did it?” asked Aurora. She didn’t need to specify who she was talking about.

“I have no idea. He must be a cryptid of some kind.”

“A very cryptid sort of cryptid. He seems so human.”

Connie snorted then, almost as if she agreed and that Henry had fooled her, too. And maybe that was what she was trying to say. Aurora still wasn’t entirely sure if the mare could understand human speech or not. Whenever they mentioned hiding treats somewhere, Connie was instantly able to find them, and when it was time to get her hooves trimmed, she would run away from them. 

“There are healing sorts of cryptids, like that Roman bird thing, the caladrius,” said Mulan.

“Henry isn’t a Roman bird, though, he’s a boy. And he didn’t just heal August of disease. He brought him back to life.”

“There are some humans with special abilities.”

Aurora had heard some stories of them, though many speculated that these enhanced humans were really just descendents of cryptids. There was even a rumor that one of them, a girl with telepathy, worked for the sheriff. The display of power that Henry had shown, though, seemed far beyond a human, even an advanced one.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Well, what do you think he is?” Mulan asked.

“I don’t know. But I want to find out.”

***

Emma jolted awake for the third time that night, drenched in sweat and shivering hard. She looked at the clock, and groaned when she saw that it wasn’t even eleven o’clock yet. She had tried to go to bed early that night, hoping it would help with the nightmares. It didn’t work, though, as the barrage of disturbing visions still plagued her every time she drifted off. Usually they featured some guilt from her past or some dread from her future. Regina popped into most of them. Sometimes she killed Emma and sometimes Emma killed her. In this latest dream, Regina had attacked her in the form of a vulture and had torn into Emma’s arm with her talons.

Emma reached up to push her hair from her face and felt a stab of pain in her left forearm. She looked down and saw some angry red cuts and puncture wounds, right in the same spot where the dream vulture had slashed at her. Emma jumped up and got dressed, putting on her red leather jacket to cover the marks on her arm. She needed a drink.

There were only three bars in New Erland. One was a sports bar that was fun on game nights, but not what Emma was in the mood for at the moment. She didn’t know much about the other two, so she just picked the one closest to her apartment and went there.

The bar was a low brick building with almost no windows. There was a red sign out front that said “The Rabbit Hole” over a rather creepy picture of a rabbit. It was dimly lit inside, which Emma liked, and crowded enough that no one paid too close of attention to her. She looked around, finding it to be a pretty standard dive bar. There were pool tables, cheap drinks, and plenty of lechers. There was also Regina, standing behind the bar and serving people drinks. Emma went over and sat down in front of her on one of the barstools.

“Evening, sheriff. It’s good to see you again,” said Regina with a smile. It was a customer service smile, a fake smile, and it pissed Emma off more than it should have.

“How’s Henry?” Emma asked.

“He’s doing much better. You know, I don’t think I got a chance to properly thank you for helping to save him. He means so much to me and I’m really grateful to you.”

Regina held her gaze for a long time and Emma felt her face grow hot. She wasn’t sure if it was from anger, jealousy, or if she was blushing, but she did know that she didn’t like it. 

“Oh, you know, it’s kind of my job to help people,” Emma said.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Whiskey.”

Regina poured her a generous amount into a glass and didn’t comment when Emma told her to leave the bottle. Emma downed her first glass and then poured herself another. It burned all the way down her throat. She wasn’t paying for the smooth, expensive stuff; she just wanted to get drunk quickly. Regina stayed pretty busy with the other patrons, taking their orders and mixing cocktails for them, but Emma didn’t mind just drinking and watching her work.

A man staggered up to the bar and leaned heavily against it to keep himself on his feet. He glanced at Emma and then gave Regina a salacious look up and down. 

“What can I get for you?” Regina asked, staying polite in the face of the man’s leer.

“I’ll have another beer and whatever you’d like,” he said with a grin.

“I’m afraid I don’t drink when I’m working, but I’ll grab you that beer.” She went to pour it from the tap and the man moved around to the other side of Emma, following Regina.

“Oh, come on. You can have one drink. Just one drink,” he said.

“She said no,” said Emma, barely able to keep her words civil.

The man looked at her as if surprised she was talking to him.

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” he said.

Emma stood. She was taller than him, which he obviously hadn’t anticipated, but he stood his ground in front of her. She grabbed him by his shirt collar and pulled him close to her.

“Why don’t you let her work without being such a creep?” Emma snarled at him.

“Get off of me!” the man said, practically yelped out. He struggled, trying to pull away from Emma’s grasp, but she held on tight. He slapped at her arms.

“Emma, let him go. I think he gets it,” said Regina.

Emma looked over at Regina and then released the man. He backed away and straightened his shirt.

“Bitch,” he muttered.

Emma stepped forward and punched him hard in the jaw, dropping him like an anchor onto the dirty barroom floor. A few people gasped and backed away from her. Others ran forward to help the guy up and try to grab Emma. She shook them off easily.

“Someone call the sheriff,” said one of the bar patrons.

“I am the sheriff.”

Emma swayed on her feet and her vision swam. There were people all around her, staring at her, but not trying to get too close anymore. She grabbed her wallet from the bar and marched outside, onto the cold and empty street. She didn’t know where she would go now, but she just needed some fresh air. She felt hot all over. She wanted to fight. She wanted to sleep. She just didn’t know what she wanted.

“Emma! Emma, wait.”

Regina came running out of the bar after her.

“What do you want?” Emma muttered.

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay. You seem…” Regina didn’t say how exactly Emma seemed.

“I’m fine.”

“I think you might be sick or something.” Regina raised her hand to Emma’s forehead, the way her mother had done when she was a child. Emma pushed the hand away roughly.

“I said I’m fine. You’ve done enough.” Emma kept walking. She felt dizzy and her vision grew more clouded with every step, until she saw the ground rushing up toward her. Then she saw nothing at all.

***

After Emma passed out, Regina carried her down the street to Gold’s Pawn Shop. She felt a little bad, abandoning the bar like that, but this was an emergency. Jerry the bouncer would just have to deal with serving drinks for now. Regina banged on the door for several minutes until Mr. Gold finally answered it.

“I’m afraid we’re closed, Ms. Mills,” he said.

“Do I look like I’m here for your junk?” Regina practically spat out. She adjusted her grip on Emma. Regina was strong, but Emma was really heavy. 

Mr. Gold crossed his arms as he looked at them and didn’t make any move to let them in.

“I need help,” said Regina, forcing herself to be nicer. “I think she’s sick or something.”

“Well, then I think the county hospital would be your best bet.”

“She isn’t normal sick. She’s something else. Something supernatural, I think.”

“I am not a doctor. Not a witch doctor, either,” said Gold. He moved to shut the door, but Regina managed to stick her foot out and keep it open.

“Please. You know about things like this. I’ll make it up to you.”

Gold considered for a moment and then stepped aside, letting Regina come into the shop.

“You can put her down in the back room,” he said, leading her back to a storage and repair room with a small sofa. Regina set Emma gently down on it.

Gold went over to a cabinet and pulled a series of strange tools out of it that he used to examine Emma. He shined a red light into her eyes, checked her gums, and pricked her finger with a little syringe looking device. He cut off a small strand of her hair and placed it in a little wooden box. As he worked, Regina paced across the room, focused on Emma but unable to ignore looking at all the strange items that Gold had in the back room. There was an old antique spinning wheel, an enormous crocodile skull, and a silver statue of a stork with human arms underneath its wings. 

“It seems that you are right,” said Gold. He began to put away his tools.

“What’s wrong with her?” Regina asked, rushing over to crouch next to Emma.

“She’s been cursed.”

“What sort of curse? Who cursed her?”

Gold shut his cabinet and locked it again.

“A sleepless curse. I’ve seen it before, a few times. It isn’t terribly elegant as far as magic goes, but it is effective. It causes the victim to be plagued with nightmares, to the point where they are unable to sleep at all. It is meant to drive them to exhaustion, insanity, and eventual death. As for who is responsible, that I am unable to answer for you.”

Regina had heard of such curses before, though she had no personal experience with them.

“How do we cure it?” she asked.

“Finding the one casting the curse and killing them could be a start. But that may take some time. For now, we can treat the nightmares. I have something here that will help temporarily, but nothing long-term. There is a creature, however, from Japan originally, that feeds on nightmares. It’s called a baku.”

Regina had never heard of it, but then again she hadn’t heard of a lot of things.

“I don’t suppose you have one,” she said.

“No, no, I don’t deal in animals.”

“But you know someone who does.”

Mr. Gold went over to a workbench and pulled out what looked like an address book. He flipped through the pages until he found the one he needed.

“Ella Darvill. She is quite good at acquiring rare and exotic animals. She’s very discreet. I can’t guarantee she will have a baku, but I can guarantee that if she does, it will be expensive.”

Regina copied the name and address out of the book. Ella didn’t live in New Erland, but in one of the neighboring towns in Storybrooke, a place called Onondaga. It would be a bit of a drive. She started to walk out of the pawn shop, but then stopped and turned back to Gold.

“You didn’t want to help at first. Why the change of heart?” she asked.

“I remembered that I owe you a favor, actually.”

She didn’t remembering doing him any favors, other than paying her rent on time.

“You killed my ex-wife, a few months back actually. I only just found out about it, though. She was a lampad nymph, living in Boston.”

“I remember her,” said Regina, thinking back to the lightning-throwing woman who was hunting Mulan.

“Well, I’m grateful.”

Regina didn’t know what to make of this information. She could shrug it off as coincidence, but it felt like more. She wanted to question Gold about it, but Emma chose that moment to twitch and whimper in her sleep, with a pained look crossing her face. Regina turned and ran out of the shop, just hoping that this Darvill woman would have what she needed.

***

Regina had called ahead to arrange a meeting with Ella Darvill at her “pet store” as she called it, though it was really just a little warehouse tucked into an alley. There was no sign or any external indication of what was inside. It was windowless, plain, and the door was partially tucked behind a trash can. As Gold had said, it was all very discreet.

Regina parked and rapped on the metal door. A woman answered it, a woman who polite people would refer to as eccentric and Regina might call downright weird. She was tall and thin, with her hair drastically dyed so that half of it was white and the other half black. She wore a slinky black dress and a long fur coat though the fur was from an animal that Regina didn’t recognize. Her makeup was severe, and would have looked more in place in a dark nightclub, but less so during a clandestine meeting with a stranger in a warehouse. She took a drag from a cigarette in a long holder and blew the smoke out at Regina.

“Ms. Darvill. I’m Regina Mills. We spoke on the phone.”

“Yes, come in, darling, out of the cold,” said the woman. 

Regina stepped inside to find two rottweilers with glowing green eyes staring at her and licking their lips.

“Oh, don’t mind the guard dogs. They are well behaved. Come into the back, that’s where we have our truly interesting creatures.”

The front room was full of rare and exotic animals, but not cryptid ones. There was a large yellow snake flicking its tongue against the glass of its tank, a gray hornbill that glowered over at them, and even a lion cub. Regina felt a surge of rage at the woman as she watched the cub scratching at its cage. She wondered if she should just murder Ella and steal the baku. She wasn’t sure what the woman was, though, so she decided to wait and come back later for the animals. Then she passed into the back room and her jaw dropped. There was such a myriad of strange and impossible looking creatures that she wasn’t quite sure where to look. There was a large aquarium with an animal that looked like a reptilian beaver. Beside it was a bird with brilliant scarlet feathers that were sometimes on fire. There were dogs with hands for tails, rabbits with antlers, and another lion cub, though this one had a scorpion stinger folded over its back. 

“So, you want a baku. I got a whole litter of them about a month ago, but all I have left is the runt,” said Ella. She opened one of the cages and pulled out a fluffy animal with a nose like a tapir. It snuffled a little at Ella’s face and snorted, spraying snot onto her cheek. Ella wiped it off with a look of disgust and handed the baku to Regina. It’s fur was soft and brown, with flecks of black and white throughout. It had a fluffy tail and big catlike paws. It looked up at Regina with shiny black eyes.

“I’ll take it,” said Regina.

“Wonderful! I thought it’s only use would be as a new rug, but it seems like it will finally be able to fulfill its purpose.”

Ella sauntered back to the front room and charged Regina an exorbitant amount for the creature. Regina paid without fuss and left quickly, happy to be out of that place. The baku settled into her lap as they drove back to New Erland. Every so often it would sniff at her and start chewing on something that Regina couldn’t see.

“Save your appetite for Emma” Regina told it.

***

Emma was sleeping restlessly in the back of Gold’s shop when Regina arrived. Her skin had gone clammy and pale and she seemed to be struggling to breathe. Gold was sitting at his workbench, looking utterly unruffled by the pain Emma was in. Regina rushed over and placed the baku on Emma’s chest. It instantly perked up. Its little ears swiveled forward and it began to sniff intently around Emma’s face. It licked her and started making that chewing motion, as it ate away the invisible nightmares in Emma. Slowly, as the baku chewed, Emma seemed to settle down. She stopped twitching and murmuring in her sleep and her breathing evened out.

“This is only treating the symptom, remember. The curse will remain until you find the witch responsible. Until then, she will have to sleep with the baku every night,” said Gold. 

“Let’s hope she’s hungry, then. Or he’s hungry. They’re hungry. How do you tell with a baku?” 

“I haven’t the slightest clue. But I doubt it cares either way.”

The baku seemed to have finished its meal and it curled up on Emma’s chest. Emma was sleeping peacefully now. They’d start the witch hunt tomorrow after Emma finally got some rest.


	13. Do I Want to Know?

_ There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. _

Maya Angelou

***

Somehow Regina managed to keep her job at The Rabbit Hole, despite leaving right in the middle of a shift. The downside was that she had to promise her boss that she would work double her usual hours for two weeks to make up for it. She was sleeping pretty solidly through the day, which made her grateful for Mulan and Aurora, who made sure that Henry was clothed and fed until Regina got back on a more manageable schedule. 

Regina got home from her latest shift and flopped face first onto the bed, not even bothering to take her shoes off as she did so. Her mother would scream if she saw Regina doing that, but luckily, that bitch was long dead. Regina was ready to drift off, but her phone buzzed in her pocket. She was ready to ignore it, until she saw that it was Sheriff Swan calling.

“Hey, Regina, I didn’t wake you, did I?” Emma asked, after hearing Regina’s tired “hello.”

“No, no, I was just- No, I was awake.”

“Good. Well, I know I haven’t properly thanked you for getting the baku for me, and I will, but I was wondering if you could help me with something else?”

Regina lay back down on the bed, rubbing at her eyes to help keep them open. “What’s that, Sheriff?”

“I’ve been going through some of the old sheriff’s files, looking for anyone who might be capable of cursing me. He wasn’t the most organized of people, but Ashley’s been helping me, and anyway, we found some reports of a witch in the forest around Caledonia. She’s done some pretty nasty stuff in the past - cursing children with an insatiable hunger to punish them for trespassing, eating stray dogs and cats.”

“Why would she go after you?”

“That’s what I want to find out. I was hoping you would come with me to interview her.”

Regina didn’t question why Emma was asking her to come along instead of the deputy sheriff.

“Yes, I can do that,” said Regina.

***

It was a long drive to Caledonia, a town on the westernmost side of the county, which meant a long time for Emma to be alone with Regina. Talking about the case was easy enough. Emma filled Regina in on all the details she had learned about the witch from the old sheriff’s reports. There wasn’t a lot of information, however, so once they had exhausted that topic, a silence fell over them. Emma didn’t know what to say to Regina. How was Emma supposed to casually mention that she was the birth mother of the child that Regina was raising, and also that she knew Regina had killed the Laroys, but she was sure Regina had her reasons and so she wasn’t going to turn her in?

Instead she just asked how Henry was doing.

“He’s great, back to his normal, healthy self. You made quite an impression on him,” Regina said.

“Really? He just saw me for a moment.”

“Well, I told him about how you got him the mandrake root.”

Emma had to think about that for a bit. She was able to recognize Henry instantly as her son, but she doubted he would be able to recognize her in the same way. Then again, he had demonstrated that he was quite exceptional.

“Can I ask you something? About Henry?” asked Emma.

Regina nodded.

“You said you thought he was human. Was his father human?” Emma asked. She felt a little guilty for the deception, but Regina wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the truth either. She wanted Regina to explain everything to her, explain why she had killed the Laroys and taken Henry in the first place. But it seemed they were both holding onto their secrets for now.

“Oh, um, I’m not sure. I adopted Henry, not that long ago actually. I don’t know much about his biological parents, or anything really. Closed adoption,” said Regina.

Emma looked over at her, trying to read her face. Regina wasn’t the most convincing liar in the world, but Emma actually appreciated that. It meant that when Regina talked about how much she cared for Henry, Emma could be sure she was telling the truth. 

“He seems very happy with you,” said Emma.

Regina smiled and said, “He’s a good kid. And Mulan and Aurora help out a lot.”

“Your roommates?”

“Yep.”

“They’re dating, right?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re single?” Emma’s eyes went wide as the words left her mouth, but she did her best to keep her focus on the road. Why had she asked that?

“I am,” said Regina, sounding pretty confused.

Emma quickly changed the subject and started talking about the baku. Emma had named her Biscuit and was currently trying to figure out how to keep her from tearing up the furniture when Emma was away. It didn’t seem right to crate her, so Emma had bought her an array of dog toys, children’s toys, and puzzles, hoping that would amuse the creature for the day. Regina laughed and told Emma about her dog and the horse she shared with her roommates.

They arrived in Caledonia and headed into the woods. If Emma thought the drive had been long, it was nothing compared to the hike to the witch’s house. Calling the woman a recluse would be an understatement; this deep in the woods her only company would be raccoons, deer, and forest sprites.

The house itself was quite a sight, a small wooden cabin propped up on tall stilts that had been carved into the shape of chicken feet. It had a green roof and in every window was a painting of an eye, so the house seemed to look out at the surrounding forest.

“They’re always going for that Baba Yaga aesthetic,” said Regina.

Emma circled around the house, but there was no staircase or ladder to climb.

“How do we get up?” she asked.

Regina jumped up, turning into a vulture as she did so, and flew up to the small porch in front of the door. She turned back to human form and raised her eyebrow at Emma, as if challenging her. Emma sighed and backed up. The porch was about ten feet off the ground, which Emma could probably make, but just barely. She was stronger than a human, but her jumping abilities weren’t anything special. She ran forward and leapt up as high as she could, just catching the edge of the porch with her fingertips. She pulled herself up and swung her leg over the side, crawling up a little less gracefully than she intended. Regina chuckled a little at her, and Emma stood up quickly and dusted herself off. She knocked on the faded red door.

There was a sound like a howling wind from inside, but it lessened and then they heard footsteps coming to the door. The door opened with a hissing noise, like the air being let out of a pressurized room, and behind it stood a blonde woman with a wool sweater and a patterned shawl around her shoulders. She looked a little like Stevie Nicks, or at least like a Stevie Nicks wannabe. She glared out at the porch, though Emma could tell she didn’t see anything at all. Her eyes were milky blue, clouded over and blind.

“Yes?” said the woman.

“Are you Magda?” Emma asked. There had been no last name on the reports.

“I am, though most people call me the Blind Witch. Who are you?” 

“I’m Sheriff Swan and this is my associate, Regina Mills.”

The witch followed the sound of Emma’s voice, leaning out the doorway toward them and then sniffing at the air in front of them.

“A valkyrie. And a vampire. Oh, a vampire with witchcraft. Well, I suppose I can’t refuse the sheriff, though I don’t like visitors very much.” She stepped to the side to let them into the house.

There was only one room inside, with a small bed, a table, and a wood stove.The stilted house swayed a little in the wind, and for a moment Emma worried about how it stayed upright. She supposed it was probably all held together by magic. There was pot of stew simmering on the stove and the ceiling was strung with dried herbs. It was simple, but oddly cozy inside, warm and filled with the smell of rosemary, lemongrass, and lavender.

“Now, what can I do for you, Sheriff? I have had no trespassers, other than you two, in years, and so have had no need for retaliation.”

“Yes, I read about your curse. Insatiable hunger seems like a pretty harsh punishment for some kids.” Emma put her hands on her hips and then realized that her power pose would have no effect on a blind woman.

“They were fine,” said Magda.

“They were hospitalized,” Emma corrected.

Magda shrugged and went over to her stew. She ladled out a small amount into a bowl and offered it to Emma, who refused, thinking of the reports of the dogs and cats Magda had eaten. Regina accepted it, though.

“What, it’s venison,” she said, seeing Emma’s disapproving look.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but Sheriff Richardson’s report said that you  _ saw _ the trespassing kids approaching your house through the window. Was that a mistake?” Emma asked.

“No, the blindness is a...recent development,” said Magda.

“How did it happen?” asked Regina. 

“I made a deal with the wrong cryptid. He thought that I hadn’t properly fulfilled my side of the bargain, so he took my eyesight instead.”

“Who was it?” Emma asked.

“Does it matter? I’m not pressing charges against him,” snapped Magda. She was getting defensive, which meant she was scared.

“Just give me a name,” said Emma.

“This isn’t what you came for.”

Magda was right, of course. Just because something terrible had happened to her didn’t mean that she was innocent of cursing Emma.

“What do you know of sleepless curses?” Emma asked.

“I know they’re cheap and dirty magic, but they can get the job done.”

“Have you ever cast one?”

Emma watched Magda carefully as she answered the question. She was pretty good at telling when people were lying, and Magda was telling the truth when she said that she had never dealt with sleepless curses. Emma looked over at Regina, trying to see what she thought about all this, but Regina just finished her stew and set it aside, her face impassive.

“Have you heard of any new witches in the county, ones that may be casting such curses?” Emma asked.

“Other than her?” Magda said, with a nod to Regina, “no, but we don’t all know each other. There isn’t a book club we all go to together.”

Regina got up and looked out through one of the eye windows.

“You can see a lot from this house. Surely you must have seen something,” said Regina. That confused Emma. Magda couldn’t see anything, unless it was some sort of witch thing. Regina handed something small to Magda, a little silver case. Magda popped it open, revealing it to be a compact mirror. She then closed it with a snap and hid it away in one of the pockets of her pants.

“I’ll tell you this. If there is a new witch around here, she’ll be in the market for supplies. And silver birches make the best brooms,” said Magda.

Emma had no idea what that meant, but Regina seemed to understand. She thanked Magda and then pulled Emma to the door. Emma wanted to protest, but Regina was pretty insistent.

When the door opened again, Emma was startled to find that they were at ground level, able to step off the porch and directly onto the ground. As soon as they did leave the porch, they heard a groaning sound and saw the house stand back up to its full height on its chicken leg stilts. Unfazed, Regina began walking back to the car.

“Hey, wait. Do you want to explain what all that was?” Emma said, quickly catching up to Regina.

“What what was?” asked Regina.

“The mirror, the tree broom thing.”

“Oh, that.” Regina got a smug a little smile on her face, as if she enjoyed knowing things that Emma didn’t. Emma stepped up closer into Regina’s personal space, standing over her and looking down. Regina kept smiling up at her innocently. She may be a badass vampire, but she was tiny. She couldn’t be over 5’3, which meant the top of her head only came up to Emma’s chin, and yet there was some undeniable power that radiated out of her.

“Yes, that,” said Emma, keeping her expression neutral.

“The mirror was a bribe. It was enchanted by a jinn a long time ago and will give her a way of seeing without her eyes.”

“How did you get it? That seems like a pretty precious gift to just give away for a bribe.”

“It was a gift from my mother, one of the few she gave me,” said Regina. She wasn’t smiling anymore. “I hated my mother,” Regina continued, “so it was pretty easy to give away.”

“Was she a vampire, too?”

“And a witch. A cruel one. But she died a long time ago.”

Emma wondered if she should reach out to comfort Regina in some way, but instead she stepped back from her.

“Anyway, now we have a way to find the witch who cursed you,” said Regina.

Emma was still lost on that point.

“Magda said the witch was going to target a silver birch tree to make a broom,” said Regina.

“So?”

“So, do you remember when we went into the forest to find the mandrake for Henry? We met the nature spirits, and one of them was the guardian of the largest silver birch tree in Maine.”

“The little gnome man?” said Emma, finally catching on.

“Alistair. And he’s Henry’s friend, so we’d better get back to him.”

Regina turned and continued back through the woods, with Emma quick to follow after her.

***

Alistair was near frantic when they reached his tree, running around the base and yelling in another language. Scottish, Emma assumed.

“The witch, the witch stole my branch,” he said, switching to English when he saw them. He pointed up to show them a scar in the side of the tree where one of the lower branches had been ripped off. Regina ran over to look at the wounded tree.

“Damnit! We’re too late,” said Emma.

“What did you see, Alistair?” asked Regina.

“The most horrible woman in the world is what I saw. She comes up, pretending to be all friendly. She even brought me some pudding from the old country - delicious stuff. But then, when I let her get close to the tree, she takes out a big knife and cuts the branch right off. The witch! And she was powerful, too. I wasn’t able to stop her.”

“Can you describe her?” Emma asked, going into detective mode.

“Tall, pale, red hair. She looked like she could be a Scottish lass, but her accent was English. It figures - doesn’t it just figure that she would be English? I tell you.” 

Emma looked at Regina. It wasn’t a lot to go on. They couldn’t exactly comb the county looking for British redheads.

“We think she’s going to turn it into a broomstick,” said Regina, trying to break Alistair out of his tirade.

“A broomstick! The silver birch belongs in the ground, not in the air. When I get my hands on that witch,” he said, waving his little hands about angrily.

“How do we find her now?” Emma asked Regina.

“Oh, I know where she is,” said Alistair.

“You do?”

“I know where every piece of my tree is. I can always feel her.”

“Can you show us?” Regina asked.

Alistair nodded, then turned and shouted into the forest. Toaket and Ivy emerged from the gloom and gasped at the sight of the tree.

“Keep an eye on the old girl while I go recover what was stolen from her, will you?” Alistair asked them.

“Of course,” said Ivy, while Toaket bared her teeth fiercely, looking ready to fight off any creature unfortunate enough to get close to her.

Alistair tucked his beard around his neck and put his small fists on his hips.

“Let’s go,” he said, marching forward.

***

The house that Alistair led them to looked innocuous enough. It was two stories, painted white, and looked no different from any of the other suburban homes on the street. There was a gray Honda civic parked in the driveway and plume of smoke coming out of the brick chimney. Emma knew she should be focusing on the witch they were about to confront, but she couldn’t help but to wonder how much a house like this would go for. She was getting tired of paying Gold’s rent.

Alistair was sitting on Regina’s shoulder as she went up and knocked on the door. It was opened by a woman who perfectly matched Alistair’s description. She had a disdainful expression on her face when she opened the door, which changed to surprise the moment she saw Alistair. She quickly slammed the door on them and locked it. 

Emma rolled her eyes for a moment and then kicked the door in, knocking it clear off its hinges so that it langed with a thud on the floor. The witch tried to run for the back of the house, but Emma leapt after her, grabbing her around the waist, and throwing her to the ground.

“Wait, wait, wait,” the witch cried as Emma loomed over her.

Emma made the mistake of hesitating and the witch managed to reach into her pocket for something and then throw a powder in Emma’s face. It stung when it made contact and Emma flinched away, rubbing at her eyes and nose. She heard a hissing sound and then a scream from the witch.

“I’ve got her,” said Regina.

Emma forced her burning eyes open and saw that Regina had pinned down the witch. Emma grabbed her from Regina and pulled her hands behind her back, handcuffing them.

“Whoever to are, you are under arrest for being a continual pain in my ass,” said Emma. She knew she would eventually have to give the witch her real Miranda rights - or at least the Bureau’s version of them - but for now she just wanted to vent a little.

“My name is Kelly West. And you had better let me go this instant!” she practically shrieked at Emma.

“Now where is it? Where is it?” asked Alistair, running through the house. He went back into the kitchen and then came out carrying the branch of his tree. It seemed far too huge for him to carry, but somehow he managed. He looked like one of those ants that could carry leaves ten times the size of themselves. Kelly had already begun to whittle the branch into a broom handle shape already, and there was some scarring and some bark had been stripped. It was mostly still in tact, though.

“Thanks for that,” said Emma. She was realizing that she owed Regina at least three times over for saving her now. 

Regina just patted Emma on the back.

“Let me go!” Kelly said, continuing to shout at them.

“I’ll take a look in the kitchen, see if there is evidence of the sleepless curse,” said Regina, going into the back of the house.

“I said, ‘Let me go!’”

“Quiet!” Emma shouted back. “We know you’re the one who cursed me. You know, I’ve heard that one way to break a sleepless curse is to kill the witch who cast it, so I would be more polite if I were you.”

Kelly went silent at Emma’s words, but continued to glower at her.

“That’s better. Now, tell me why you cursed me. I’ve never even met you.”

Kelly looked like she was going to refuse to speak, but then she blurted out, “The Bureau thinks they can just come here and interfere with everything! Things were just fine in Storybrooke until you showed up. I heard what you did to the water serpent and I knew you’d be cracking down on me next. I just wanted to get you out of the way.”

“And why did you attack my tree?” Alistair asked.

“I had thought the sheriff would be incapacitated by now. It seemed as good a time as any to make my new broom.”

Regina returned then, carrying a bag full of spell ingredients and other incriminating evidence.

“Let’s take her to the station then,” said Emma, pulling Kelly to her feet.

***

They dropped Kelly West off at the basement of the sheriff’s station and then drove back to Regina’s house to return Alistair to his tree. They went with him through the woods and found Toaket and Ivy still standing guard over the birch. 

“You got it back,” said Ivy, sliding down to the ground.

“Do you think you could reattach it, Ivy?” Alistair asked.

“It’s damaged, but I can try,” she said. Emma and Regina lifted the branch back into place and held in position. Ivy began to sing to it in her clear, sweet voice, just as she had to the mandrake root. This time, however, her words did not make them feel sleepy, but rather energized and healthy. Slowly, the wood of the birch began to grow up and around the broken branch, until they were once more attached to each other. Ivy stopped her song and examined the branch. There was still a definite scar where the branch connected to the tree, but overall it looked quite healthy.

“Thank you, Ivy. And thank you two for helping me get it back,” said Alistair, running his hand over the white bark of the tree.

“Well, we never would have found the witch without you,” said Emma.

They left the nature spirits to their business and headed back to the house.

“Do you, um, think you would want to come over for dinner?” Regina asked as they walked. “I know Henry would love to see you,” she quickly added.

“Yes, absolutely,” said Emma, trying and failing not to sound too eager. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to see Henry again.

Regina smiled.

Back at the farmhouse, Henry ran and practically tackled Emma into a hug when he saw her.

“Hi, Sheriff,” he said.

“How are you, Henry? You look so much better,” Emma said. She cupped his face, but then realized that might be too familiar of a gesture and quickly dropped her hand.

“Emma’s staying for dinner tonight,” said Regina. “It’s my night to cook and I was thinking maybe pasta puttanesca or something like that.”

“That sounds delicious, but really I’ll eat almost anything,” said Emma.

Regina raised her eyebrows a little at that. Given that she herself ate human hearts, she very much doubted that Emma would eat  _ anything _ .

“Henry, can you go ask Mulan and Aurora if they’re ok with pasta tonight?” Regina asked.

Henry bounded up the stairs two at a time and then returned a minute or so later.

“They say they’re going out tonight,” he said.

He had also brought his sketchbook down with him, and he sat himself down at the coffee table to work in it while Regina began cooking. Emma went to sit down next to Henry.

“Can I see your drawings?” she asked.

He shrugged, looking suddenly shy.

“You mom has told me about what a good artist you are, but if you want to keep them private, I understand. But, just to let you know, I can’t draw worth a damn, so anything you do will impress me,” she said.

Henry giggled a little at that and slid his sketchbook over to her. Emma started at the beginning. The drawings seemed to be mostly of animals, though the animals grew continually stranger throughout the sketchbook. They started out as songbirds, cats, and many drawings of Hank the dog, but then things like Ozark howlers and the Jersey Devil began to make an appearance. There were several of a vulture that Emma assumed was Regina, as well as all the forest spirits they had met. The last drawing and the one Henry was currently working on was the most interesting, however. It appeared to be a woman with long hair, wearing a suit of armor, and holding a sword above her head.

“Is this me?” Emma asked.

“Yeah,” said Henry, looking a little shy again.

“It’s really good. I don’t think I’ve ever looked this cool in real life. How did you come up with this idea?”

Henry shrugged. “It just felt right for you to have a big sword, I guess. I still need to do the background.”

“Can I see it when you’re all finished?” she asked.

“Sure!” said Henry.

She passed him back the sketchbook and he began to fill in some mountains and a lake around the figure of Emma. He also added some lines around the sword, so it looked like the blade was shining. There was something almost familiar looking about it, but she couldn’t quite remember what. The smell of roasting garlic and tomatoes soon distracted Emma from all thoughts of Henry’s drawing.

***

Mulan waited until both the deputy and the sheriff’s secretary had left the station and then went up to easily pick the lock on the front door. There was a security system in place, but it was simple enough to turn off.

“Some date night this is,” muttered Aurora from behind her, as they crept into the station.

“You’re the one who wanted to do this,” said Mulan.

It was true. It had been Aurora’s brilliant idea to break into the sheriff’s station to see if the Bureau had any more information on Henry. Now that they were here, though, she found herself having some doubts as to how good this plan actually was.

“Are you sure the place is empty?” Aurora asked.

“I’m sure it’s not, actually. I saw a prisoner down in the basement, but she’s locked up. So just keep your voice down and it’ll be fine.”

Aurora sighed and tried to quiet down her nerves. Mulan took a seat at the desk and opened Emma’s laptop. It was password protected, but Mulan was as good at breaking into computers as she was at breaking into buildings, so she had soon logged on. 

“Why don’t you look through some of the physical papers, while I search the computer?” said Mulan. 

Aurora was sure Mulan was just giving her something to do to keep her occupied, and she did appreciate it. It was better than just standing around and worrying about them getting caught. She started with the top drawer of the desk, thumbing through all the documents and then carefully putting them back as she had found them. They all seemed to just be reports of crimes that the sheriff had investigated around the county, and there was nothing on either Henry or Regina.

“Hold on,” Mulan muttered to herself. Aurora leaned over to read the computer screen over Mulan’s shoulder.

“Adoption papers,” she said, confused.

“It was in her search history. Emma was looking up the adoption records for a boy born August 15, 2007.”

“Ten years ago,” said Aurora.

“It was a closed adoption. The boy was sent into foster care and named ‘Henry.’” Mulan looked up at Aurora who was frowning at the screen. She switched tabs.

“And here are the records of the birth parents,” she said, pointing them out to Aurora.

“Emma Nolan-White and Neal Cassidy,” Aurora read.

“Emma is Henry’s birth mother?”

“We need to tell Regina.”

Mulan agreed and quickly printed off the information. She wiped the laptop’s memory of her hacking and wiped the keyboard of her fingerprints.

“Let’s go,” she said.

***

Henry had insisted that Emma stay for awhile after dinner to watch a movie with them, and Emma couldn’t find it within herself to refuse. He had selected Star Wars IV, a movie he was obviously familiar with, as he was able to quote all the lines along with it. As much as Emma enjoyed Star Wars, she was finding it hard to concentrate with Henry cuddled between her and Regina. There was something so domestic about it and Emma was not used to domestic. She found herself easing into, though. It was quite nice actually to simply sit and watch a movie with her son, even if said son was unaware who she really was. She wondered once again if she should tell them the truth. It was such a peaceful night, though, and she really didn’t want to ruin it. She stayed quiet and tried to focus her attention on what Obi-Wan Kenobi was saying.

Mulan and Aurora came home from their date, earlier than expected. Perhaps they were just morning people and liked to go to bed early. Judging by the expressions on their faces, however, something had gone wrong.

“Is everything ok?” Regina asked, pausing the movie and going over to them.

In response, Mulan handed her a few sheets of paper. Regina read over them, her expression getting darker and more concerned as she did, until she looked up at Emma, eyes wide.

“You’re Henry’s birth mother?” she blurted out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the truth comes out


	14. Water Under the Bridge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to leave you on such a cliffhanger! I've been having some computer problems, so updating is a little tricky right now.

_ Man hands on misery to man. _

_ It deepens like a coastal shelf. _

_ Get out as early as you can, _

_ And don’t have any kids yourself. _

Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse”

***

There was a ringing sound in Emma’s ears, a bit like when a gun went off to close to her and she wasn’t wearing earplugs. She knew she should say something, anything, but she just stared open-mouthed from Mulan to Regina to Henry. This wasn’t supposed to be how this happened. She was waiting for the right time to tell both of them. She was going to prepare the perfect speech so that they both understood her reasons for letting Henry go and for not telling them right away who she was.

“I-I…” she started to say, but she didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

Henry also looked like he was at a loss for words and was frowning with confusion at Emma. He then turned to Regina, as if asking her what to do next.

“Let me explain,” said Emma.

Regina handed the papers back to Mulan and crossed her arms. Her expression looked hard and unforgiving, but Emma was grateful that she at least looked willing to listen.

“What’s going on? Are you…?” Henry asked in a small voice.

“Henry, I-. It’s true. I am your birth mother, but I-I wasn’t able to keep you.” She reached her hand out to him, but he recoiled, backing up to Regina.

“You knew this entire time?” Regina asked.

“As soon as I saw him in the hospital. I didn’t know before then. But I-”

“Get out.” 

Emma flinched. 

“Just let me-”

“Get out,” Regina said again, louder this time. Her face looked different, as if she were suddenly sunken and starving. Her sharp white teeth were growing more prominent and she was beginning to hiss.

“I’m sorry,” Emma said, and she turned to leave the farmhouse.

Emma banged her fist on the dashboard when she got back into her cruiser. How could she be so foolish? Why hadn’t she just told them the truth in the first place? Her stomach clenched as she thought about the expression of hurt on Henry’s face as he found out the truth and the rage radiating off of Regina. It was probably a good thing that she had given the kid up for adoption actually, because if she could fuck up this bad when she was just an acquaintance of his, she didn’t want to think what she could have done if she were actually his mother. She started the car and drove back towards town, when her phone vibrated in her pocket. She didn’t really want to talk to anyone, but it was Ashley calling, so it might be important.

“Hey, Ashley. What is it?” Emma asked.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Sheriff,” she said, her voice sounding strained.

“What’s wrong?”

“I was wondering if you could do me favor?”

“Of course,” said Emma, without hesitation.

“Well, my water sort of broke and I think I’m in labor. My roommate was supposed to take me to the hospital, but she had to go out of town for a funeral. The due date is supposed to be next week, so I thought it would be okay.” Ashley broke off and let out a little whine, Emma assumed because a contraction hit her.

“I’ll be right over. Are you at your apartment?” Emma asked.

"Yes.”

Emma hung up and sped up on the quiet road. In a way she was thankful for the distraction, but also, helping a woman give birth was perhaps not the best thing to get her mind off of the own baby she had given up.

***

Regina wrapped her arms around Henry and held him tight to her. He seemed so mature for his age about certain things, but he was still only ten, and there were things that were hard for a ten year old to understand. Hell, there were plenty of things that were hard for her to understand as an adult.

“I’m sorry. We should have waited to tell you in private,” said Mulan.

“No, it’s ok,” said Regina. She pulled Henry back over to the couch and sat him back down.

“Do you want to talk about this right now?” she asked him.

He nodded, still looking a little lost.

“Why didn’t she just tell me?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t explain why Emma did the things she did, but I think we should ask her. Tomorrow, maybe. When everyone is a bit calmer.” By “everyone,” Regina really meant herself, because she was certainly not calm at the moment. She tried to act like it as best she could, though, for Henry.

“She gave me away.”

“Yes,” said Regina, frowning a little.

“To the Laroys.”

Regina sighed and hugged Henry. “She didn’t know you would end up in a home like that. She probably thought she was giving you your best shot. There are a lot of reasons people have for giving up a child. Sometimes they’re too young or don’t have enough money, or they aren’t in a situation that would be safe for a baby.”

“She didn’t want me.”

Regina didn’t know what to say to that. She probably should have read a book or something about adoption and how to deal with these questions.

“But I do. I wanted you to be my son so badly I literally killed for it,” said Regina. She noticed both Mulan and Aurora raise their eyebrows at that and she realized she hadn’t quite told them the full story of how she had adopted Henry. They didn’t say anything, though, so Regina continued. “Look, I didn’t have the best family growing up either. My mom was, well, a pretty cruel person and my dad never did anything to stop her. But, I’ve found that you can make your own family, which is even better, because you can pick people who love and support you. So here you’ve got me and Hank, Mulan and Aurora, and all your forest friends, and we aren’t ever going to give you up. Does that help?”

Henry still looked a little shaky and upset, but he nodded and burrowed into Regina’s side.

“And Connie,” he said, his words muffled against Regina’s shirt.

“And Connie,” she agreed.

Mulan and Aurora came to sit on the couch with them, and not wanting to be left out, Hank joined them, convinced he could be a lapdog despite his size.

“Should we finish the movie?” Regina asked.

Henry nodded. She pressed play and Henry seemed to relax a little as they watched the trash compactor scene. As they watched, Mulan reached over and tapped Regina on the arm.

“Killed for him,” she mouthed silently over the top of Henry’s head.

“They beat him,” Regina mouthed back.

Mulan gave her a thumbs up and went back to watching the movie. Regina was glad they all seemed relatively distracted by the film, but she was having trouble concentrating on it. There were too many questions rolling around in her brain for her to really focus on anything. The fact that Emma was here, in this town of all places, was concerning to say the very least. And she arrived not long after Regina and Henry had, which meant she had likely come to town for them. And she worked for the Bureau, which wanted to arrest Regina, and that was just an extra complication that Regina did not need right now.

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine,” said Henry, quoting along with the movie.

Henry was already more powerful than Regina had first imagined. He was half valkyrie, she now knew and half something else. She needed to ask Emma about Henry’s father, but that would have to wait until later. For now, she just wanted to be with Henry and make sure he was ok.

***

When they reached the hospital, Emma helped Ashley into a wheelchair and went to find the OB-GYN. Ashley’s contractions were painful, caused her face to scrunch and twist as she worked through them and Emma quickly hurried back with the doctor, a middle aged woman named Dr. Banerjee.

“How far apart are the contractions?” asked the doctor.

“About five minutes,” said Emma.

“Alright, Ashley, we’ll get you set up in a room and check your cervix dilation.”

Ashley only groaned as another contraction hit her.

They were able to get a private room, and Emma helped Ashley into the hospital bed. Dr. Banerjee did a few checks and then left them alone, saying she’d be back to check on them soon. Ashley was still for awhile, frowning at her belly as if she were trying to will away the contractions.

“How bad does it hurt, really?” she asked.

Emma didn’t ask her how Ashley knew that Emma had given birth before. It was hard to keep secrets from a telepath, after all. At this point, Emma didn’t feel like lying, either.

“It hurts a lot, but you kind of forget about it once it’s over.”

Henry had been a big baby, and had had a big head. The labor hadn’t been too bad, but the delivery was painful. Emma had a vague memory of squeezing her mother’s hand so tight, it probably hurt Mary Margaret, as well. But that wasn’t the pain she remembered. She saw him for only a moment before she turned away. She couldn’t bear to hold him, thinking if she did then she never would have been able to give him away. At the time she thought giving him away was the best choice. She probably would have been a bad mother anyway, she thought. 

Emma patted Ashley’s hand and went to get her some water.

***

In the neighboring town of Onondaga, a young couple with a young toddler was getting ready for bed. Kathryn Davis was giving their daughter, Maddie, a bath while her husband Jim took the dog for a walk. She heard the door open and shut as Jim got back home.

“Took you long enough,” Kathryn shouted, hoping he could hear her from downstairs.

There was no reply.

Kathryn went back to shampooing their toddler’s tiny tuft of hair.

“Always late, always keeping me waiting. It drives me up the wall,” she muttered to herself.

The dog started barking from downstairs and Maddie whimpered a little.

“Jim, get the dog to be quiet,” Kathryn yelled.

There was a high pitched yelp and the barking stopped.

“Yes, dear,” called Jim’s voice.

Kathryn sighed and threw down the wash cloth she was using. She stood and left the baby in the bathtub to stomp down the staircase. She could feel her body start to shake as she made her way into the kitchen to stand in front of the sink. She heard Jim walk up behind her.

“You didn’t do the dishes,” she said.

“I did them last night.” 

“Then why is there a massive pile of dirty fucking dishes in my sink, Jim?”

“Why are you always getting at me?” Jim shouted, slamming his hand down on the counter. 

Kathryn turned around to face him, holding a knife she had pulled from the sink. She took a step forward and stabbed Jim in the stomach, twisting the blade inside him. He fell to the floor and a bright pool of blood began to pour out of him. She washed the knife with hot water and set it neatly on the drying rack, before going into the living room. Their dog was lying motionless on the rug, his head bent at an unnatural angle.

Upstairs Maddie’s cries grew louder and louder.

***

Ashley's baby was born the next morning. She was a girl, small, but healthy enough. Ashley named her Alexandra and rocked her gently.

“Do you want to hold her?” Ashley asked. 

Emma smiled but shook her head.

“No, I should go check on Phillip. Make sure the town isn’t falling apart without us.”

“Right,” said Ashley. She looked at Alexandra for a moment. “I don’t know when-”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re on paid leave for the next two months, at least. I’ll come check on you later.”

“Thank you,” said Ashley.

Emma patted her on the shoulder and left the hospital. The sun was up, and not hidden behind clouds for the first time in a week. A bird passed overhead and Emma flinched for a moment, before realizing it was just a raven, not a vulture. She shook herself out of it and drove back to the sheriff’s station. 

“Sheriff, I was about to call you,” said Phillip, when she walked in.

“Ashley had her baby. A girl, six pounds. They’re both doing ok.”

“Wish I could say the same for the Davises.”

“Who are the Davises?”

“New case in Onondaga.” He handed her a slip of paper and said, “That’s the address. Husband strangled the family dog, then the wife stabbed him and left their three year old daughter locked in the bathroom all night. The husband is in critical condition, but the daughter wasn’t physically harmed. Onondaga has a small local police force and they’re expecting you.”

Emma rubbed her face. “Ok, I’ll grab some coffee and head over. Can you check on Ashley?”

“Sure.”

After a night of helping a woman give birth, the last thing Emma wanted to do was deal with a domestic violence and attempted murder case. But she supposed it was all part of the job. She rubbed at her eyes again, trying to will herself some energy and then went to get ready.

***

Kathryn Davis was a blonde soccer mom type who didn’t look like she had the upper arm strength to bury a kitchen knife nearly four inches deep into someone. Still, Emma was well aware that looks could be, and often were, deceiving. Kathryn looked distraught now, with her hair a mess and tear tracks down her face, sitting under the harsh fluorescent lights of the Onondaga police station holding room. 

“We get some weird ones for sure around here, but this one just doesn’t make sense,” one of the police officers was telling Emma. “No domestic calls, no criminal record, not so much as a DUI for either of them. And then he kills the dog with his bare hands and she stabs him. Weird, huh?”

“Some people are good at hiding things,” said Emma. Then, “Can I speak with her alone for a minute?”

" Sure, sheriff. I better get started on the paperwork,” said the officer, leaving Emma outside the holding room door.

Kathryn’s head snapped up when Emma entered, though her expression still looked lost and dazed.

“Ms. Davis, I’m Sheriff Swan. I’m going to be helping the Onondaga P.D. with this case. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Alright,” said Kathryn, her voice sounding a bit hoarse.

“Let’s start with yesterday. Was anything unusual? Did you and Jim get into a fight?”

Kathryn nodded slowly. “We just bought a new house last week. We spent a bit more on it than we intended to, and I think we were both stressed from the move.”

“You were fighting about money.”

“Sometimes we do.”

“Can you take me through the events that lead to the stabbing?”

Kathryn took a deep, uneasy breath before continuing. “I was giving Maddie a bath. Then I heard Jim come in. I think I heard him kill the dog and then I just…” she trailed off.

Emma waited for a moment and then gently prompted Kathryn to continue.

“It felt like fire running through my veins. I got so angry, angrier than I've ever felt. I could barely see straight, and then I went downstairs, got the knife, and when he came up behind me, I stabbed him.” Kathryn’s voice became shakier as she spoke until finally fully devolving into sobs.

“Take a deep breath,” said Emma, and Kathryn did. “Now, did you see the dead dog before you stabbed Jim?”

Kathryn shook her head.

“So that wasn’t the reason you stabbed him?”

Again Kathryn shook her head.

“I-I don’t know why,” she said. 

Oddly enough, Emma believed her. She was pretty good at catching lies, and there was something convincing about Kathryn’s utter and devastated bewilderment.

“Ok, and then after the murder. Why didn’t you go and get Maddie out of the bathroom?”

“I just...forgot. I didn’t go back upstairs. I just sat there on the couch all night long.”

“They said you called the police yourself the next morning.”

“Yes.” 

“You haven’t asked for a lawyer.”

“I’m guilty.”

Emma paused, looking over the woman. Kathryn’s previous emotion had all but dissipated, leaving behind a sort of emptiness. She looked like a marionette that would collapse to the ground if the strings were not still holding it up.

***

Regina entered the Sheriff’s station and was disappointed to find Emma absent and the nervous little deputy on duty instead. She had met the man only once and very briefly, if you could even consider it a meeting. After she had pulled Emma out of the ocean, he had come running up and she had quickly flown away as a vulture. Emma said later he was called Phillip or something. He was human, though obviously aware of the supernatural, and he jumped to his feet, wide-eyed when he saw her.

“It’s you,” he said.

“It’s me,” she agreed. “Where’s Emma?”

Phillip’s right hand twitched, as if he were considering reaching for the pistol at his belt.

“Wouldn’t do any good,” said Regina, eyeing the gun.

“No?”

She shook her head. She was lying, of course. She was more resistant to injury and faster to heal than a human, but bullets would still hurt like hell and possibly kill her. Luckily, Phillip didn’t seem like the type to call her bluff.

“So, Emma?” she asked again.

“Sheriff Swan is...out.”

“Right. Phillip, was it? Do you remember what I did to that water serpent?”

He nodded.

“That’s what I’ll do to you if you don’t tell me where Emma is.” Regina gave him a big smile, doing her best impression of a hungry wolf.

“Ok,” he said, his voice a little higher than usual. He quickly scrawled an address on a little scrap of paper and handed it to her.

“Thank you so much,” said Regina. She gave him a little pat on the cheek before leaving the station.

***

So far the crime scene wasn’t being any more helpful than Kathryn had been. The house itself was a pleasant two story in a nice neighborhood. Other than the stain of dried blood on the kitchen floor and the dog urine on the living room carpet, it seemed quite pleasant. Emma walked through the place, noting the pottery barn furniture, the generic but pretty artwork on the walls, the cardboard boxes laying around still waiting to be unpacked. She opened one up and looked into it, finding a load of books, mostly what appeared to be historical fiction.

Then the sound of breaking glass came from the dining room. Emma got up and looked in to see a picture frame had fallen off the cabinet. She picked it up and turned it over to see a photo of the Davis family behind the broken glass. It had been taken outside, either in a park or their old backyard and showed Jim with his arm around Kathryn, who in turn was holding baby Maddie. They all had big smiles on her faces, but then again, you never knew what was behind the smiles.

Emma set the picture back on the cabinet, giving it a more secure position, and decided to take a look upstairs. She checked the master bedroom, Maddie’s bedroom, the bathroom, but found nothing out of the ordinary. She hoped Maddie had relatives who would take her in, as it was looking like Kathryn would soon go to jail and Jim wasn’t likely to survive his wounds. Poor little girl. Emma stared for a moment at the bathroom tile, where Maddie had spent the previous night.

There was the sound of glass breaking again from downstairs.

Emma went down and found the picture frame once again on the floor of the dining room.

“The hell?” she said softly to herself. She walked over and picked up again. The glass was not just cracked this time, but shattered and falling out of the frame. But it was the photo itself that caught Emma’s attention. The faces of Kathryn and Jim had both been scratched out by something, whereas Maddie’s face had a ring of scratches circling it, as if someone had run a nail around her face over and over. Emma laid the photo down on the cabinet and turned around.

“Fuck me!” she gasped out, seeing that Regina was standing right behind her.

“Sheriff,” said Regina smoothly, crossing her arms.

“How the hell did you sneak up on me like that?”

“I was quiet and you were distracted.” Regina gave her a satisfied little smirk.

Emma grabbed the photo and said, “This wasn’t funny.”

“I didn’t do that.”

Emma tilted her head, giving Regina a hard look.

“I’m serious. I have better things to do than go around marking up strangers’ photographs. Besides, I just got here.”

“Come on, Regina, I know you were messing with me.”

Regina raised her eyebrows.

“I was not  _ messing _ with you. I didn’t fly all the way out here to  _ mess _ with you.”

“Then, why are you here? Is Henry ok?” Emma asked.

“He’s pretty shaken, but he’ll be fine. We need to talk, though.”

Emma looked down at the picture.

“You promise you didn’t do this?” she asked.

Regina rolled her eyes and held up three fingers. “Pinky swear,” she said sarcastically.

Emma thought it was better not to mention that the three fingers was the boy scout promise not a pinky swear. In spite of Regina’s heavy sarcasm, Emma believed her.

“Ok. I need to look around here for anything that could explain this weird case. Do you mind walking around with me while we talk?”

Regina just shrugged, but she followed Emma back upstairs to look more thoroughly through the Davis’ bedroom.

***

Emma immediately started pulling things out of the bedroom closet and sorting them into piles that Regina didn’t understand or bother to ask about. She was busy standing by the window, arms crossed as she watched the sun lower over the neighborhood.

“So why did you give him up?” she asked.

Emma looked up briefly and then back to the box of winter clothes she was rooting through.

“It’s complicated. You know, I really don’t know if I can get into it right now.”

“You said we could talk while you worked,” Regina snapped. “What are you even doing?”

“I’m trying to figure out what made this family attack each other,” Emma said, her voice rising.

“You don’t need to yell at me. I mean, who the hell do you think you are?” said Regina, also yelling.

“I think I’m the person trying to investigate this case and trying not to let you get in my goddamn way.”

“Oh, I’m so fucking sorry I’m being a hindrance to you. I only saved your sorry life how many times now? I’ve lost count. You’re a bitch and a liar, you know that? Ugh, I’m leaving. This was useless.”

Regina marched out of the bedroom and down the staircase, nearly shaking with rage as she went. She felt hot all over, feverish with the emotions running through her veins. There was a rushing sound building steadily louder in her ears, some great dam of pressure threatening to break. 

Why was she so angry?

She had come here to make peace with Emma and to hear her side of the story, not to get into a shouting match with her. She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself, but her chest felt too tight and the air in the house too stuffy to be soothing. She needed to get out. She grabbed the doorknob and yanked open the front door, or at least she tried to yank it open. The door, however, seemed to be as obstinate as Emma and refused to budge. Regina checked the lock, but it was open, and even if the door were locked, she should be strong enough to pull it apart. Frustrated, she slammed her hand against it, but the wood didn’t so much as crack under the force.

Regina turned and went to the back of the house to try that door, but found it very much the same. The back door was made of glass panes and should have been easy to break. Regina went into the dining room, grabbed a chair, and then lobbed it as hard as she could at the door. It hit the glass with a thunk and bounced off onto the kitchen floor. 

“What the hell have you done now?” she screamed.

She went into the dining room and stared at the mutilated picture of the Davis family.

***

Emma didn’t remember how she had ended up in Maddie’s room. She thought she had been in the parent’s bedroom, looking through their boxes, but now she was standing in front of Maddie’s little bed, holding a pair of scissors in her hand. Where the hell had those come from? She looked around the room. There was something strange about the paintings on the wall, but Emma couldn’t quite figure it out.

There was a stuffed elephant on the bed with a nose that reminded Emma of Biscuit. She lifted the scissors and stabbed through the elephant. She cut off its nose, tail, and legs and then ripped out the stuffing from inside. It was too unsatisfying. She needed something else.

***

Regina’s hands were bleeding and there were little shards of glass embedded in the palms. She clenched her fists as if she could squeeze the blood out, drain herself of it completely. All the dishes, wine glasses, and vases in the kitchen had been shattered and were lying in tiny pieces around her. Flecks and smears of red blood covered them.

She heard footsteps behind her. Emma wasn’t nearly as good at sneaking up as Regina herself was.

“What do you want?” she asked, turning to face her.

Emma leaned against the kitchen doorway, holding a pair of scissors at her side. She was looking down at the wreckage of glass and porcelain with an odd glint in her eyes.

“I’m sick of you,” she said, looking up at Regina. She paused for a moment and then lunged at Regina, but Regina was quicker and managed to roll out of the way, cutting her shoulder and arm up as she did. She jumped to her feet and ran, not really caring about destination, just trying to get away from Emma.

“When I catch you, I am going to rip that soul right out of you and devour it whole,” Emma said, her voice calm and steady. Regina didn’t look back as she leapt over the stair railing and took the stairs two at a time. She could hear Emma slowly following her. 

“Try it and I’ll rip the heart out of you,” she screamed back.

She ducked into the first door, finding herself in a child’s bedroom. There was a stuffed animal strewn in pieces on the floor, but it was the paintings that caught Regina’s attention. Whimsical portraits of brightly colored animals were hanging neatly on the walls, but each had had their eyes stabbed out. 

“How do you kill the dead?” she asked. Then she began to whisper quickly as she could to herself before Emma arrived.

***

Emma found Regina sitting on the floor of Maddie’s room, her eyes milky white as they watched Emma. 

“Finally.” Emma lunged forward and grabbed Regina by the throat, knocking her to the ground. She reached out for the soul inside and once she found it, pulled it out of Regina.

Regina gasped a little and fell back on the floor. Emma hadn’t realized how loud the rushing in her ears had been until the sound cleared and all she could hear was Regina’s breathing. She held the soul tightly in her fist. She felt calm, her anger subsided, but then she realized what she had just done.  


“Fuck,” said Emma. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Is that really necessary?” asked Regina.  


Emma froze. Typically people didn’t speak once they had their souls ripped out. She took a closer notice of the soul she held, a small angry thing that didn’t remind her at all of Regina.

“What? Um...what?” she said.

Regina sat up, her eyes no longer white.

“It seems-” she coughed a bit, rubbing at her throat, “that this house had a little bit of a poltergeist problem.”

“A poltergeist? Damn, I should have known that. No wonder we were going so nuts. How did you stop it?”

“I tricked it into possessing me, because you said you were going to rip my soul out and eat it.”

“Right, sorry about that,” said Emma, wincing a little.

Regina just shrugged. “Anyway, I thought the poltergeist’s soul would be closer to the surface, so when you did your whole...valkyrie thing, you caught the ghost.”

Emma sat back against the wall.

“So did you eat it then?” Regina asked.

“What?”

“The soul?”

“Oh, I don’t actually eat them. I was just trying to scare you, I guess.” Emma felt her face grow a little hot.

“It worked,” said Regina, looking at Emma.

Emma felt a clinch in her stomach. Regina had the most intense eyes, fierce even in her fear.

“I’m sorry,” said Emma again.

“What do you do with them if you don’t eat them?”

“I can either return them to their body or send them on to the psychopomps. But this one I’ll send back to the BCC. We’ll have to get Kathryn out of prison, probably relocate the whole family.”

Emma shook her head, thinking about the mess this one ghost had made. She could feel it rattling around in her grasp, trying to escape into the world again. No chance of that. She got to her feet and held a hand out to help Regina up.

“I’m ready to get the hell out of this house,” said Regina, leading the way out.

Emma really couldn’t agree more.

***

“How did you know where to find me anyway?” asked Emma as she drove them back to New Erland.

“Your deputy told me. He’s pretty easy to threaten if I’m honest.”

Emma gave her a look. “You know you’re a wanted criminal, don’t you? You can’t just walk into the sheriff’s station whenever you like.”

“It’s not like Phillip’s gonna call the BCC, is it? Wait, is it? Do you think he will?” Regina suddenly looked nervous.

“He’s human. He doesn’t know how to contact them, but Jesus, you still need to be careful.”

Regina smiled at her.

“Alright, I will be.”

Emma felt that strange fluttering, clenching feeling in her chest again.

“But, Emma. We really need to talk about Henry.”

Emma nodded. But she didn't know at all where to start.


	15. Toxic

_ Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. It is the dosage that makes it either a poison or a remedy. _

Paracelsus

***

Spring was always slow to come in Maine, but when it did it was well worth the wait. Amy Matoaka has always loved it when the snow finally melted away and the endless white was replaced by the violets, yellows, and pinks of the wildflowers. She and her wife Nakoma were primarily fruit and vegetable farmers, but they always liked to plant rows of wildflowers by the house and along the fields for all the pollinators. 

Neither of them had grown up on a farm, but they were millennials, tired of corporate greed and the large-scale agriculture industry. They had moved up to Maine for college and stayed to start their own organic farm. They started small and had a horrible first year, so horrible they had both had to take second jobs, Amy as a bank teller and Nakoma as a bartender. But since then, they’d gotten better. They’d learned how to rotate their crops, how to keep their soil healthy, and how to actually get a good yield.

They had gotten their potato seeds into the ground a few weeks ago, and Amy was keen to see the progress of the young seedlings. As she made her way out to the plot, some movement in the grass caught her eyes. She bent down and watched as a fat bumble bee staggered and twitched through the grass, seeming unable to walk in a straight line. It turned over and kicked, unable to right itself. Amy pushed it over with her finger, frowning a little. She stood and kept walking, but soon stopped again. Underneath a cluster of lupine flowers were some scattered black spots. Amy went closer and got on her knees to look carefully. They were bees mostly - honeys, bumbles, and solitaries alike - but there were some moths and flies mixed in, as well, and all dead or dying.

“Goddamnit,” she said. 

They must be spraying something strong in one of the adjacent farms, and whatever is was had drifted over into her fields. It was hard enough to keep an organic certification without the neighbors overspraying their fields. But then again, she had thought the closest farms to them were all organic, as well.

Amy sighed and continued over to the potatoes. Instead of bright green leaves popping up, she found a large patch of the field that was full of blackened and shrivelled plants. The edges of the plot were still green, though a bit withered, but the center was like a stain of rot. She pulled out one of the damaged plants to find its roots to be stunted and dead. Nakoma had checked on the potatoes just two days ago and they had been fine. The cause of the rot, whatever it was, was acting fast.

***

Emma got home and collapsed into bed beside Biscuit, just in time for her morning alarm to go off. She groaned. The conversation with Regina had gotten a little involved to say the least, carrying over from the car ride home throughout the night and into the next morning. It had been draining, though perhaps cathartic in a way. It was the first time in a long time that she had truly opened up about Henry, about every detail that led to him going up for adoption. And it had given her an explanation, too, as to why Regina had taken Henry. Hearing about Henry’s life with the Laroys had been hard, but hearing about Regina killing them was suddenly satisfying.

“I’m glad he found you,” Emma had said, trying not to let her voice break.

“I’m glad I found him.”

And then Regina told Emma about their madcap road trip to Maine and their life in Storybrooke County. When she got to their visit to Jefferson, Emma felt a twist of guilt, knowing the BCC had arrested him soon after. She would have to do something about that, put in a good word for his early release. He wasn’t violent at least, so the BCC would try to rehabilitate him. Emma was tired of secrets, so she had told Regina about Jefferson’s imprisonment, and Regina had just sighed and rubbed her eyes and asked about Paige.

“She has an aunt in Missouri,” Emma said.

Then they talked about Henry some more. Regina told Emma about his favorite movies and comic books, and how he was afraid of thunderstorms, but loved spiders. Emma smiled as Regina talked but she felt sadder than she thought she would.

“So he must have gotten some of your powers. I mean, he did something to August,” Regina said, trailing off at the end, still unsure what exactly Henry had done.

“Actually that doesn’t really make sense to me. I can take a soul, hold it, and give it back. I can let the soul go, on to the afterlife or whatever. But valkyries can’t pull a soul out of thin air. It’s like he was able to reverse what we do.”

“And his dad was human?”

“Yep, but Neal’s mom was nymph. But nymphs can’t do anything like that.”

“And your dad?”

“Berserker. Strong, but not much else.”

Eventually though, they had had to part ways. Emma had wanted to go home and sleep all morning, but the unceasing alarm was still reminding her that she had to go into work that day. She got back up and dragged herself into the shower.

***

The house was quiet when Regina walked in, but it didn’t stay that way for long. Early as it was, Henry was awake and went rushing up to her.

“Where were you?” he asked her. “You were gone all night long.”

“Sorry, Henry. There was a whole ghost thing I had to take care of.”

He wrapped his arms around her and held tight. She touched his head softly and then stepped back, taking his hands in hers.

“I talked to Emma yesterday.”

Henry looked at the floor, frowning at it.

“She explained some stuff to me and answered some questions I had. I was thinking maybe you would want to-”

“No,” said Henry.

Regina had been leaning forward a little, but she straightened up when he said that.

“Not yet, I mean,” Henry corrected.

“Ok, it’s up to you. But let me know if you want to.”

He nodded.

“I’m going to go get some more sleep. It was a long night. When I wake up, we’ll work on some math, yeah?”

“Ok,” said Henry, looking even more glum.

They had decided not to enroll him in the local school, not wanting to attract too much attention to themselves, but Regina still wanted him to learn some basic skills at least. Together, she, Mulan, and Aurora had been doing their best to teach him history, math, science, and writing skills. Henry was an avid reader, and enjoyed learning - though math was probably his least favorite subject. It was likely an inconsistent education at best, but it was something. 

Regina still didn’t feel like she had this whole parenting thing down. Then again, perhaps she would never feel that way. A part of her wanted Emma to become more involved in Henry’s life for the simple reason that it would take some of the stress off of her. She loved Henry more than she ever would have imagined, but sometimes she wondered if she was really doing right by him.

***

“New case, Sheriff,” said Phillip as soon as Emma got in.

“Cryptid or human?” she asked, heading straight for the coffee machine.

“Not sure. Some local farmers think someone is poisoning their fields. Here’s the address.” He handed it to Emma.

“Can the troublemakers of this county take just one day off? I’m tired,” Emma whined.

“No rest for the wicked.”

“Alright, I’ll head out. Oh, remind me later to call the Bureau. The stabbing from yesterday turned out to be a whole ghost thing, so we’ve got to get Kathryn Davis out of jail.”

Phillip nodded. He was looking a bit frazzled, as well. With Ashley out on maternity leave, he was having to cover her workload along with his own. They should probably hire someone on temporarily.

“Did you go see Ashley?” Emma asked.

“Yep, she’s leaving the hospital today. I’m going to take her home, and then her roommate gets back tomorrow.”

“They kick ‘em out fast, don’t they? Well, I’d better go see what we’re dealing with,” said Emma.

She drove out of New Erland and into the countryside, following some dirt roads up to Matoaka Organic Farms. The sign out front had a painting of a hummingbird and some bees on it. She pulled up to a cluster of buildings, which seemed to be a house, a small storefront, and chicken coop. The chickens were all out, pecking around in the grass, but scattered when Emma got out of her car. 

“Are you the sheriff?” called a voice. A woman came walking out of the chicken coop with a cluster of eggs in her shirt.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m Sheriff Swan.” Emma held out a hand, which the woman shook with some difficulty, trying not to drop all the eggs.

“Do you need a hand?” Emma asked.

“No, I’m alright. I’m Nakoma. Let me drop these off and then we can show you the field.”

She led Emma into the house and introduced her to her wife, Amy.

“You always forget a basket,” said Amy, smiling. She got up to help put the eggs in a fridge. She was taller than Nakoma and had long, shiny black hair like Regina’s.

“Ok, let’s go see the field,” said Amy.

“So, when did you notice the damage?” Emma asked, following the two of them out.

“It was all fine a week ago. And then on Monday we noticed half our field was dead. We had an entomologist and a plant pathologist out to look at it. They tested the soil, the plants, all off it, but they said they couldn’t find any unusual bugs, fungus, or disease. We asked if it could be pesticides, but they said this severe of damage would’ve had to be something strong and directly applied to the field.”

“And you don’t spray?”

“No, we usually just put the chickens in the gardens to eat the slugs and beetles.”

They reached the field, where a large stain of dead plants spread out from the center of the field.

“I think it’s getting bigger,” said Nakoma.

“It looks like some of the plants have been pulled up, too,” said Amy, pointing to a few disturbed areas. “We sent some samples to test for chemical residues, but we won’t hear back for awhile.”

“Can you send me the results when you get them?” asked Emma. She bent down and pulled up a dead potato plant. She wasn’t really sure what she was looking for. She had grown up in DC, far from farms of any kind.

“Mind if I take a few samples of my own?” she asked.

“Whatever you need,” said Amy.

***

Emma shipped the soil and crop samples overnight to the Bureau. As she waited for the results to come in, they had more reports of dying crops around New Erland. The newly planted fields were blackening and decaying from the mysterious rot, all with same symptoms as the Matoaka’s farm. 

Fortunately, it didn’t take long for the Bureau to respond. When Emma had been stationed at the headquarters in DC, the head of the science lab, Dr. Jekyll, had always given her the creeps, but she couldn’t deny his efficiency. It was Belle who called with the results of Jekyll’s analysis, as per usual.

“What have we got? Cryptid or chemical?” asked Emma.

“Sort of a cryptid chemical,” said Belle. “There were strong residues in the soil and plant tissue from a unique toxin.”

“So what are we dealing with?”

“Well, that’s the interesting part. We don’t know.”

“Don’t know?” Emma repeated.

“It’s not in any of our records, but then again not everything is. It could be something very rare or very isolated in one part of the world.”

“Fantastic,” said Emma dryly. “So I’m pretty much going in blind to kill this thing?”

“Director White requests that you capture and not kill the cryptid. After all, it could be a new species.”

“I’ll do what I can, but tell the director I make no promises.”

“Those poor plants, though,” said Belle, not giving any indication she had heard Emma. “Dr. Jekyll will keep analyzing the toxin. I’ll send you the full report once he’s done.”

“Alright, thanks, Belle.” Emma hung up the phone.

***

Connie was grazing in the pasture beside the farm house, but she raised her head and trotted over when Regina approached. Regina took an apple slice out of her pocket and gave it to the mare. 

“I thought you and I could go for a ride today. What do you say?”

Connie snorted, which Regina took as a yes.

Regina had had a horse when she was a young child, a tall red gelding named Rocinante. She had chosen the name after reading about the silly nag in Don Quixote. Her mother had hated it, as she hated most things Regina did, and had tried to get Regina to change it to something more elegant. In this instance, Regina had stood firm, so Rocinante it was. He had been gentle and calm to ride, like Connie, and then he had died suddenly of a heart attack, though from natural or unnatural causes, Regina still wasn’t sure.

Regina put a bridle on Connie and climbed onto her back without a saddle, another thing her mother would have disapproved of, not because she feared Regina getting hurt, but rather because it looked uncouth and could cause Regina to fall off and get dirty. Cora Mills’ priorities were always somewhat at odds with Regina’s.

But that bitch was long dead, so Regina tried to put her out of her mind. She nudged Connie with her foot, asking her to go faster and faster over the fields and alongside the woods that surrounded their house. 

A buzzing in her pocket caused her to pull Connie to a stop. She dug out her cell phone and answered it.

“Hey, it’s me,” said the person on the other end.

“Luckily, Sheriff, you have a distinctive voice.” 

“What? Oh right, right.”

Regina felt the corners of her mouth twitch up just a little at Emma’s scatteredness, not in a complete smile, just a hint of amusement.

“Listen, I was wondering if you wanted to work another case with me,” Emma continued.

“Honestly, at this rate you should be hiring me on as a consultant, at least.”

Emma chuckled at that.

“As much as I would really like to, you’re still very much a wanted criminal. I’m not sure I could get away with it. Maybe I could make it up to you another way?”

Regina’s raised her eyebrows at that. 

Emma made a few stuttering noises and then quickly said, “Um, I mean I could help you move furniture or, you know, heavy lifting. I’m pretty strong. I know you are, too, but just if you needed some extra help.”

“Well, thank you, Sheriff. You actually are helping me, in a way, helping me keep a promise to Henry.”

“Oh, what’s that?” Even over the phone, Emma wasn’t able to hide her eagerness to hear about Henry.

“To make up for all the murdering and heart eating that I’ve done, he thought I should help people. You know, do some good deeds. I suppose helping you catch violent cryptids might be a good start.”

There was a pause and then Emma said, “Well, happy to help.”

It was Regina’s turn to laugh at that.

“Do you think we could meet somewhere? The sheriff’s station won’t work, obviously,” Emma said.

“I don’t think the farmhouse will work either. Um, Henry said he needs a little time before…”

“Before he sees me?”

“Yes.”

Regina heard a little sigh on the other end of the phone.

“I can’t blame him for that,” said Emma after a moment. “Ok, how about my apartment?”

“Give me an hour or so and I’ll meet you there.”

Regina turned Connie around and began the run back to the house.

***

Emma filled Regina in on the rotting crops situation in the small kitchen in her apartment. She was still hunting for a bigger place, but so far the only houses she liked were either haunted or outrageously overpriced. She thought Biscuit might like to have a real backyard to run around in, so she was set on a house or a duplex. The baku did seem a little pent up in the one bedroom apartment. Biscuit perked up when Regina arrived, though, quickly climbing into her lap and chewing away at invisible things.

“I’m not sure you’ll be much help with this one, Bis,” said Emma, leaning over to scratch her behind the ears. Biscuit made a snuffling sort of sound and went back to eating Regina’s potential nightmares.

“At least I’ll sleep well tonight,” said Regina. She turned back to the B.C.C. toxin report, scrunching up her face a little as she read through it. Emma watched her for a long moment, before realizing she was staring and turning quickly away.

“Right, I’m going to be honest. I don’t remember anything from high school chemistry, so this is pretty much nonsense,” Regina said, once she’d finished scanning the report.

“Yeah, I thought the same. It’s not much to go on, is it?”

Regina shook her head. “How many farms did you say were affected?”

“Five so far. They’re all within ten miles of each other. Kind of hard to stake out all of them, though.”

Regina frowned a little, then stood up.

“Actually, that gives me an idea. Text me the farm addresses and I’ll meet you there in a few hours.” She handed Biscuit to Emma and left the apartment before Emma had a chance to ask what exactly her plan was.

“Any clue what that was about?” she asked Biscuit.

The baku just snorted at her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be continued


End file.
